Why Americans Keep Reading Them

Self-Help Books
00.Ftmtter.i-xiv/Dolby 1 2/7/05, 10:14 AM

Self-Help Books
Why Americans Keep Reading Them
sandra k. dolby
University of Illinois Press

urbana and chicago

First Illinois paperback, 2008
© 2005 by Sandra K. Dolby
All rights reserved
Manufactured in the United States of America
∞ This book is printed on acid-free paper.
1 2 3 4 5 c p 5 4 3 2 1
The Library of Congress cataloged the cloth edition as follows:
Dolby, Sandra K., 1946–

Self-help books : why Americans keep reading them / Sandra K. Dolby.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
isbn 0-252-02974-7 (hardcover : alk. paper)
1. Self-help techniques—United States. 2. Psychological literature—
United States. I. Title.
bf632.d65 2005
646.7'00973—dc22 2005002017
paperback isbn 978-0-252-07518-6
00.FM.i-xiv_DOLBY.pmd 4 11/8/07, 3:14 PM

Contents
Preface vii
Introduction: Self-Help Books and American Worldview 1
1. American Popular Self-Education 19
2. The Books, the Writers, and Metacommentary 35
3. The Critics, the Simple Self, and America’s Cultural Cringe 56
4. Giving Advice and Getting Wisdom 76
5. Memes, Themes, and Worldview 93
6. Stories 112
7. Proverbs, Quotes, and Insights 135
8. Finding a Use for Self-Help Testimonies 147
Epilogue 157
Notes 161
Bibliography 163
Index 183

Preface
In the pages that follow, I shall offer some conclusions that I have reached
after surveying more than three hundred examples of popular nonfiction
currently in print, all of which relate in some way to the American obsession
with improving our practical and spiritual well-being. However, let me first
say a little about why I have chosen to undertake this study. Recently my sis-
ter, Carol, was sorting through some of the accumulated stuff from one of
the rooms of my parents’ home when she found a box holding several years’
worth of drawings, paper dolls, handmade books, and assorted glued things
evidently contributed by my youngest brother and me when we were around
six and nine years old. The cache contained an item that intrigued me be-
yond the expected nostalgia and reminiscence—a paper and pencil “news-
paper” titled the Sandra Dolby Press (dated May 30, 1956) and bearing the
headline “Mrs. Gertrude Dolby reads Bible through 5 and a half times.” There
followed front, side, and back view drawings of my grandmother (Mrs. Ger-
trude Dolby) and a short (very short) article announcing: “Every day Mrs.
Dolby sits down and reads the Bible. She has never failed in reading it yet.”
I’ve certainly seen far more impressive creations from nine-year-olds, but
what intrigues me—beyond the perhaps interesting fact that indeed I did grow
up to be something like a newspaper reporter—was the subject matter itself.
I had forgotten how often I would go to my grandmother’s house (she lived
alone in the house next to ours) and find her reading the Bible. The reading
was a kind of morning ritual, as was writing in her diary. Years later, and some
time after my grandmother died, I asked my aunt Ann if I could have the many
diaries my grandmother had written. I have them now—skeletal and sugges-
tive reminders of those years when I was growing up, those years when I as-

viii Preface
sumed that anyone who had the time must do that when they get older, must
read and think and write.
Not all people do read and think and write, of course, and some who do
are in fact young rather than old. Nevertheless, the idea that this trio of ac-
tivities was somehow a good thing stayed with me. My sense of its “good-
ness” was fairly unsophisticated, tied as it was to my love and respect for my
grandmother. Yet, increasingly, now as a scholar, a folklorist, with a wealth
of tools and theories available to examine such things, I have continued to
be intrigued by this process of self-education. This book is my indulgence
of that abiding question: Why did my grandmother feel compelled to read
and think and write about her own life? Why do humans find it necessary to
educate themselves about life, about the spirit or soul, and then write about
it? And what form has this urge taken now as one millennium has ended and
another begun?
For my grandmother, all three activities seemed to be equally important
and intertwined. It is too late now for me to ask whether it was important
that the reading be from the Bible, though I know she often read poetry as
well. It is too late to ask what form her thinking took, though I do know that
until her very last years, she served as a teacher for the older adult Sunday
school class at her church. Her thinking must have taken some form that
could be adapted and discussed in a weekly class. And though I have her di-
aries, it is too late to ask how the events of her life and the lives of her friends
and family affected her sense of how life is best lived.
But my grandmother was in many ways a part of the fin de siècle. She was
born in 1879. Her cultural frame of reference included the introduction of
the motorcar, World War I, the Jazz Age, Prohibition, the Great Depression,
and finally World War II. The 1960s and everything since were not a part of
her worldview, and this change-filled era of the 1960s has had a decided in-
fluence on the form and direction such introspective self-education has as-
sumed among much of the American population during the last part of the
twentieth century. It is my aim in this book to examine what I see as the late-
twentieth- and early-twenty-first-century answer to this need for self-edu-
cation: the popular nonfiction paperback, the self-help book. My argument
is that, for many contemporary educated Americans, self-help books provide
a welcome resource in the individual effort to grow in wisdom and lead a
satisfying life. Furthermore, there are many writers of varying talent and
insight willing to provide that accessible wisdom. Self-help books, whether
we like it or not, are part of the continuing process of constructing and as-
sessing an American worldview.
And I admit here at the beginning that my particular slant in the exam-

Preface ix
ination of this phenomenon—the rise of this body of popular nonfiction

literature—is influenced by my own longtime interest in writers or story-
tellers as “bearers of tradition,” as we say in the discipline of folklore study.
One effect of this slant, combined with my interest in written literature, is
greater attention to the texts themselves and their writers rather than to the
readers of such books. Thus I have not interviewed people who have read
these books, as one would do in a typical ethnography, nor have I compiled
statistics about the typical readers, as one might do in a sociological study.
Instead, I have addressed a preliminary question, one that seeks to describe
the content of these books, and I have aimed my discussion primarily at the
general reader, anyone who might find the phenomenon of self-help books
in America intriguing, either intellectually or personally.
As I have brought my thoughts on the subject to some sort of closure—at
least enough to create a title and send off a manuscript—I have come back
repeatedly to three books that have recently been published and now lie pro-
vocatively on my table, tempting me toward three entirely different ways of
treating the subject. One is fairly obvious—Tom Tiede’s Self-Help Nation,
published in 2001 with the telling subtitle The Long Overdue, Entirely Justified,
Delightfully Hostile Guide to the Snake-Oil Peddlers Who Are Sapping Our
Nation’s Soul. Tiede’s book, like Wendy Kaminer’s I’m Dysfunctional, You’re
Dysfunctional published ten years earlier, heaps contempt upon the writers—
and in fact the readers—of self-help books, gleefully airing all of the worst
literary and conceptual sins of the writers and righteously outlining the char-
acter weaknesses of the readers who would eagerly take in such rubbish. I will
have more to say later about why it might seem tempting to simply pan the
whole self-help movement as opportunistic on the part of writers and sheep-
like and wimpish on the part of readers, but, in fact, the dismissive tone of
Tiede’s diatribe forcefully reminds me of what I, in contrast to Tiede, am
about in writing this book. I am, above all, prepared to see the writers and
the readers of self-help books as sincere and intelligent people who partici-
pate in the formation and articulation of an American worldview. Writing
and reading self-help books is part of that process, and the books at the cen-
ter of that process need to be taken seriously rather than simply dismissed
as modern-day “snake-oil” remedies. My aim is to examine those books care-
fully and fairly, using the tools of folkloristics, my academic discipline.
I intend, then, not to write a popular critique such as Tiede’s Self-Help
Nation. A second book on my table is Douglas V. Porpora’s Landscapes of the
Soul, published in 2001. Unlike Tiede’s book, Porpora’s volume has two ap-
pendices, copious endnotes, a large bibliography, and an index. This is clearly
an academic work, and its subtitle, The Loss of Moral Meaning in American

x Preface
Life, suggests that the author has undertaken his project with the utmost
seriousness. Porpora’s book is one easily listed as an important contribution
to American studies. Its disciplinary ties are to the sociology of religion, along
the lines of books by Robert Wuthnow or Robert Bellah. And like Wuthnow
and Bellah, Porpora conducts both statistical surveys and individual inter-
views to gain information useful to his arguments on, in this case, why Amer-
icans have trouble articulating and acting with a sense of moral purpose. I
like Porpora’s book, but I am troubled by the way he elicits and uses the in-
terview materials—a perennial problem in my own discipline, which rou-
tinely examines minutely the individual presentations of oral stories and
other creative artifacts. As a folklorist, I expect much greater rigor in the
process of eliciting and creating suitable “field texts,” but I accept the obvi-
ous fact that Porpora’s aims and methods are different from those a folklor-
ist would use. On the more general question of what Porpora is about in
writing his book, however, I would say we do share an important objective—
the careful examination of the moral or spiritual dimension of an American
worldview.
So I do intend to write something similar to Porpora’s Landscapes of the
Soul, an academic book suitable to a more popular audience simply because
it addresses a concern that many Americans do see as important: their own
personal sense (or lack) of purpose. This brings us to the third book on my
table, André Comte-Sponville’s Short Treatise on the Great Virtues: The Uses
of Philosophy in Everyday Life, first published in France in 1996 but translat-
ed into English only in 2001. Like Porpora’s book, A Short Treatise is a work
intended for a well-educated readership, though it is clear that the author has
tried to make his work accessible to the general reader rather than only to
other scholars. What I especially like about Comte-Sponville’s book is the
intent indicated in his subtitle—the uses of philosophy in everyday life. Read-
ing the book is a fairly demanding activity, even though the author hides
many of his erudite expansions and much of his argumentation in the fifty
pages of notes. But his intent is to demonstrate how eighteen ideas—named
and discussed as “virtues” in this study—are used as part of the everyday per-
sonal philosophy of any ordinary individual. In other words, he provides a
working list of the themes that are a part of most people’s personal philoso-
phies and gives us one template for the examination of a personal worldview.
Do I intend to write something like Comte-Sponville’s Short Treatise? I
wish I could, but no. However, I do see in his classification and examina-
tion of these common virtues a potential finding list useful for identifying
essential components of varying worldviews. And, like Comte-Sponville, I

Preface xi
am interested in how other writers have influenced the way people articu-
late their personal philosophies, their worldviews. It may seem a long stretch
from Comte-Sponville’s examination of the writings of noted philosophers
to my examination of the writings of contemporary self-help authors—a
long stretch from seeing ties to popular worldviews in the works of Plato
and Aristotle, Kant and Spinoza, Sartre, or Henri Bergson to seeing such ties
in the works of Wayne Dyer, Stephen Covey, Marsha Sinetar, or John Gray.
But my argument is that there is a strong similarity. People use contempo-
rary self-help books in their own learning projects, much as people have used
classical philosophers and the Bible in the past. A first step in examining this
process is an exploration of the books themselves.
One of the landmark books in this emerging tradition is Marilyn Fergu-
son’s Aquarian Conspiracy: Personal and Social Transformation in the 1980s
(1980). Ferguson wrote as a classifier and celebrant of what she saw as a new
movement and gave a name to the shared vision behind this new quest:
The paradigm of the Aquarian Conspiracy sees humankind embedded in na-
ture. It promotes the autonomous individual in a decentralized society. It sees
us as stewards of all our resources, inner and outer. It says that we are not vic-
tims, not pawns, not limited by conditions or conditioning. . . . The new per-
spective respects the ecology of everything: birth, death, learning, health, fami-
ly, work, science, spirituality, the arts, the community, relationships, politics. (29)
This list of “everything” the new perspective respects is, in fact, a list of the
topics addressed by the many authors writing books of popular nonfiction in
the last four decades of the twentieth century and early years of the twenty-
first.
In the process of speaking to these topics, the authors of popular self-help
books, either knowingly or simply as human vehicles of the culture them-
selves, place before us many of the values typically identified as the basic stuff
of a collective worldview—many of the “virtues” examined by Comte-Spon-
ville, Porpora, Bellah, and others. Each self-help author offers his or her read-
ers a focused meditation on how they might best act with prudence in their
individual lives. Perhaps more crassly than do scholarly philosophers or theo-
logians, each self-help author conspires to sell us wisdom—in most instances,
wisdom we already own as part of our collective American heritage. I do not
believe that readers are being led by the nose nor that their response to self-
help literature is a kind of cultural determinism by which they acquiesce to
a dominant ideology. Self-help books are a valuable cultural resource, and
American readers have, through the marketplace, demanded that the resource

xii Preface
be continually renewed and available. And self-help writers have willingly

given us their wares, their interpretations of a tacit worldview in the form of
guidebooks and philosophical reflection.
In the pages that follow, I shall examine how such writers draw upon the
resources of American culture, consider them, and recast them into an emerg-
ing popular philosophy. I shall analyze the contents of these books that car-
ry such appeal and inspiration for a popular American audience, an audi-
ence that, like my grandmother, feels a need to reflect upon life and become
prudent, self-educated, self-reliant, perhaps even wise. Many of the themes
Ferguson articulated in her 1980 publication will be sounded again and again.
Many of the stories and sayings that are a part of American culture will be
singled out as significant resources incorporated into these books of popu-
lar nonfiction. Ultimately, my own background as a folklorist will determine
an emphasis on how narratives, sayings, and traditional values are used in
conveying and articulating a common worldview. But the emergence of pop-
ular nonfiction is a phenomenon that invites the attention of all contempo-
rary thinkers. I hope my folkloristic and descriptive look at the topic is a
useful beginning.

Self-Help Books

Introduction: Self-Help Books and
American Worldview
Do most Americans share a single, collective worldview? In other words, in

the language of nineteenth-century ethnologists who gave us the word, are
we Americans a “folk”? Most contemporary thinkers would argue that we
cannot be viewed as a single entity—a folk. We are too diverse; we are the
clearest example of multiculturalism in the world. And yet to outsiders, with
every new Disneyworld or McDonald’s that springs up on foreign soil, we
export American values, American ideas—an American worldview. I suspect
that both opinions are valid. Worldview is a slippery concept. I have chosen
to use it here precisely because it is a slippery concept. It draws to it all the
riffraff of ideas, behaviors, songs, tastes, maxims, stories, and rituals associ-
ated with a group of people.
Anthropologists have tried to make the study of worldview a more pre-
cise art. They have given us helpful units of comparison. But the study of
worldview shared by a diverse and well-educated population is potentially
much more complicated than would be the study of worldview shared by a
homogeneous, traditional culture. And in either case it is not an easy task,
as the “stuff” of worldview is embedded within the culture and is variously
affected by the individual voices that are recognized as articulating it. Still,
I think that some light might be shed on this complex issue of American
worldview through an examination of the self-help books that are current-
ly so popular. Ultimately, worldview is best studied through an ethnographic
process—eliciting individual responses to a specific set of research questions.
But a careful study of self-help books can be a first step in this process.
Because self-help books are so conspicuous in America, we can assume
that, for many people, they figure into the mix of important influences in the
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2 Introduction
formation and articulation of personal philosophies—the building blocks of

a collective American worldview. Furthermore, I am prepared to argue that
the writers themselves are at every turn extracting elements of an existing
American worldview and incorporating them into their books. These writ-
ers are, in effect, giving back to their readers the worldview they and the read-
ers already share. They are recycling an already well-established American
worldview.
Let us consider some of these books more directly. Everyone who visits a
bookstore has noticed them—the paperbacks offering advice and reflection
on topics as diverse as how to achieve psychological well-being, how to be
effective yet serene in the workplace, why the laws of physics are part of God’s
plan, how to get along with your mate or with nasty bosses, how to reduce
stress and eat and exercise for optimal health, how to save the planet, why to
save the planet. Everyone has noticed them. My purpose here is to examine
them as a significant aspect of the contemporary American worldview, as a
reflection of some of our current concerns, hopes, and practices, and to of-
fer some insights into the role such books play in popular self-education.
Many questions might be asked about these books, about their authors and
readers, but I am going to ask three basic questions: (1) Do these books rep-
resent a popular literary tradition, or is this a new phenomenon? (2) Can we
account for the success of these books? (3) What do these books tell us about
the popular wisdom of mainstream Americans? These three questions might
be seen as fundamental themes that wend their way through this entire study.
However, before I address them directly, I would like to briefly set the stage
for viewing books of popular nonfiction as cultural artifacts, as expressive
performances rather like the ballads, fairy tales, or legends that folklorists
usually study. I will not argue that they are examples of folklore but rather
that they can be seen as functioning as folklore and as having been created in
much the same way that folklore is created. Perhaps, like personal narratives—
stories people tell based on their own real experiences but incorporating the
frame of narrative borrowed from tradition—these popular self-help books
are neither fish nor fowl, neither entirely original nor entirely formulaic. But
they are surely popular expressive productions, and as such they both con-
vey and incorporate elements of an American worldview.
The Appeal of a Proven Formula

As I was pondering why one encounters so many of these books of popu-
lar psychology, alternative medicine, inspiration and spirituality, business
advice, and even layman’s science and theology as one browses the shelves
000.Intro.1-18/Dolby 2 2/7/05, 10:15 AM

Introduction 3
of various bookstore chains, I kept thinking of another popular American

phenomenon—the urban legend. Urban legends are those realistic, disturb-
ing stories that invariably happen to a friend of a friend and sometimes end
up as the plots of movies. They are everywhere, and new ones arise daily. One
of the latest has to do with the individual who wakes up in a bathtub of ice
only to discover that one of his kidneys has been removed for sale in the il-
legal organ replacement market. Why would I be reminded of such stories
when pondering the popularity of self-help books? It is not simply the stun-
ning popularity of the two phenomena that is impressive. Rather, it is the fact
that both phenomena can be analyzed and more clearly understood as ex-
amples of a folkloric process hard at work in American culture.
Before I develop this thesis, let me recount one of my favorite urban leg-
ends. Ideally, I would tell this in a much less formal setting—for example,
sitting at a kitchen table, drinking coffee, and talking with my sister and her
neighbor.
Becky told me this about a friend of hers up in New Haven. This friend had
gone to a party without her husband since he had the flu. The party was in Fort
Wayne. She left the party to go home at about two in the morning. She gets into
her car and notices that another car starts up right behind her. After a while it
seems like this car is following her, so she starts speeding up to see if she can
lose him. Pretty soon she starts running red lights and stop signs, but he just
keeps right behind her. By now she’s really scared. When she gets home, she pulls
into the driveway and lays on the horn. Her husband comes out and says, “What
the hell’s going on here?” The woman gets out of the car and points at the car
behind her. “This guy followed me all the way home.” By now the guy in the
car behind gets out, and the husband says, “What’s the idea?” and sort of shoves
his wife behind him. “Before you get mad,” the other guy says, “let me say that
I followed your wife because when I started my car up, I saw a man’s head bop
down in the back seat of her car. I wanted to make sure he didn’t try to hurt
her.” The husband went over to his wife’s car and opened the back door. There
was a man with a knife in the backseat.
Granted, the outcomes of many such legends are much more dire—usually
death or injury in some form. But the threat of death is here, and more im-
portant, we can see the structural pattern of the urban legend in this story as
well as in any other. It is this pattern that leads us to suspect we have an urban
legend even before other examples of “The Killer in the Backseat” have been
collected. First, there is a risky situation (the woman out alone at two in the
morning); then we are led to imagine a worst-case scenario (the woman is
threatened with death or injury); and finally, there is an ironic twist at the end
(the real threat was the killer in the backseat, not the man following her). The
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4 Introduction
pattern itself has great appeal; it is what persuades us to call such stories a
“genre” of folklore. And that pattern is what, to some extent, accounts for the
popularity of these otherwise very unpleasant stories.
Can my discipline and I account for the popularity of not only urban leg-
ends (which are easily recognized as folklore) but also such books as M. Scott
Peck’s Road Less Traveled (1978), Stephen R. Covey’s Seven Habits of Highly
Effective People (1989), Susan Jeffers’s Feel the Fear and Do It Anyway (1987),
James Redfield’s Celestine Prophecy: An Adventure (1993), Wayne W. Dyer’s
Your Erroneous Zones (1976), Marsha Sinetar’s Do What You Love, the Money
Will Follow (1987), Phillip McGraw’s Self Matters: Creating Your Life from the
Inside Out (2001), or Lynn Grabhorn’s Excuse Me, Your Life Is Waiting (2000)?
Evidently I think we can, or I wouldn’t be writing this book. Part of this ac-
counting is tied to the presence of a pattern, as with the urban legend. For
people who tell and listen to urban legends, there is something in the artis-
tic pattern of a risky situation, a worst-case scenario, and an ironic twist at
the end that is effective aesthetically, even if the content is disturbing. And I
would argue that there is a pattern characteristic of popular nonfiction that
satisfies and draws readers to the genre and persuades writers to create new
books with the assurance that they will please their audience.
One of the earliest studies to recognize the positive effect of a proven nar-
rative formula was Vladimir Propp’s Morphology of the Folktale, first pub-
lished in Russia in 1930 but not translated into English until 1958. Propp dem-
onstrated that European fairy tales all share a single structure. Later, in 1976,
John G. Cawelti in his Adventure, Mystery, and Romance: Formula Stories as
Art and Popular Culture brought the structural thesis to bear on these three
genres of popular literature, and more recently Janice A. Radway (Reading
the Romance: Woman, Patriarchy, and Popular Literature [1984]) has used the
notion of formulaic writing to launch a fuller discussion of why readers (in
this case, women) enjoy popular romances. It seems reasonable to me that
there is a recognizable formula for writing an effective book of popular non-
fiction as well.
What is this form or structure that characterizes books of popular non-
fiction? Within each subgenre of popular nonfiction, there are traditional
forms that can be identified—the pseudofable, the several steps program, the
definition of parts. However, the basic structure of all varieties of self-help
books in particular is much closer to the structure that Alan Dundes, in his
study of North American Indian tales, identified as essential to all narrative:
lack and lack liquidated (1965, 208). When applied to popular nonfiction, this
basic structure becomes, first, a suggestion that something is wrong with us,
with the culture that guides or programs us, or with our information about
000.Intro.1-18/Dolby 4 2/7/05, 10:15 AM

Introduction 5
the world (lack); and second, a suggestion of what might be done to correct
this problem (lack liquidated). As with our recognition of the basic struc-
ture of the urban legend, our recognition of this basic structure—a critique
of the culture and a solution—allows us to compare the many books of pop-
ular nonfiction to each other in an increasingly meaningful way.
Whose Taste?
When Jan Harold Brunvand came out with the first of his many published
collections of urban legends (The Vanishing Hitchhiker) in 1981, he said, “As
tellers of American urban legends, whether adolescents or adults, we are a
highly mobile and often fairly affluent folk” (19, my emphasis). Thus, he
justified the frequency of “automobile legends” among the many legend
types. But his statement also implies that he, an upper-middle-class, well-
educated professor of English, could well be among those who tell and lis-
ten to such urban legends as “The Killer in the Backseat.” Almost everyone
can admit to being “taken in” by at least one urban legend. I remember be-
lieving that “The Hook” (in which an escaped sex maniac with a hook for
one of his hands tries to attack a parked couple) was a true story and really
did happen along Devil’s Backbone, the local lovers’ lane in the countryside
just outside my hometown of Huntington, Indiana. Urban legends flourish
among college students, office workers, assembly line workers, homemakers,
teenagers who work at McDonald’s, even college professors. However, be-
cause the genre and its formal “giveaway” features—especially the twist at
the end—are becoming so well known, many people are less gullible than they
used to be. Likely there is a trend among storytellers to claim a level of so-
phistication too high to actually believe such stories. There may come a time
when only the most naive listeners will actually believe urban legends.
Still, there is no specific group that “owns” urban legends or even specific
legends such as “The Killer in the Backseat.” Folklorists often speak of an
individual’s participation in a “folk group”—for example, women as a folk
group—even though any such group is an abstraction and rarely homoge-
neous in the way that the term “folk” might imply. Women might more likely
tell “The Killer in the Backseat” since the cautionary lesson is directed at
them. It could be argued that there is a “taste” that supports the telling of
such legends among women. More often, however, the “conduits,” as Linda
Dégh calls them, responsible for the transmission of such stories are deter-
mined more by class and age than by any other factor.
If we look to the readership of popular nonfiction rather than to the par-
ticipants in legend-telling, the importance of the question of taste is even
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6 Introduction
more obvious. Herbert J. Gans, in his study Popular Culture and High Cul-
ture: An Analysis and Evaluation of Taste (1974), argues that
the major source of differentiation between taste cultures and publics is socio-
economic level or class. Among the three criteria that sociologists use most often
to define and describe class position—income, occupation, and education—
the most important factor is education (by which I mean, here and elsewhere,
not only schooling but also what people learn from the mass media and other
sources). (70)
If we substitute Gans’s notion of a “taste culture” for the broader term “folk
group” in folkloristics, we can see that there may be a group of people more
inclined to read popular nonfiction than others and that the constituency of
that group might depend upon, among other things, their level of education.
It is a given that members of this group or “taste culture” must be literate
and like to read (though, in fact, many of these books are available on au-
diotape or CD, often recorded by the authors themselves). It is telling, I think,
that many of the writers of such books are themselves very well educated;
many have advanced degrees and hold academic appointments. On the other
hand, it is also interesting to notice that these books are considered “popu-
lar” rather than academic. Notes are few or absent; most lack a bibliography.
One author, Deborah Tannen, on the flyleaf of her book You Just Don’t Un-
derstand: Women and Men in Conversation (1990), separates one list of oth-
er popular books she has written from another list of “scholarly” or “edit-
ed” books that support her career as a professor.
One could easily suspect that some of these successful, highly credentialed
authors might be feeling slightly ashamed of their popular writing. After all,
it can be read and understood by people who are middlebrow, people who
have not been trained to be quite so discriminating in their reading, people
who do not demand much of their cognitive skills. Donald Lazere in his ar-
ticle on literacy and mass media reminds us that “most mass communica-
tion aimed at adults, both in television, radio, records, or film, and in print,
is at a literacy level not much higher than that of children’s programming.
. . . Commercial media must appeal to the largest possible market, thus to
the lowest common denominator of cognitive development” (1986, 289).
Some writers whose writing styles are clearly suitable only for scholarly writ-
ing team up with popularizing editor-writers in an effort to meet the differ-
ing demands of this popular audience. From one perspective, this is an ad-
mission that scholarly writing is elitist, purposefully convoluted and obscure,
and often not a joy to read. As David Damrosch says of the writing expecta-
tions placed upon graduate students (future scholars, learning to write in an
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Introduction 7
academic style), they “must become less emotive, more analytic, and their
work must move beyond a personal reaction to a text or an issue and situate
itself explicitly within the scholarly debate” (1995, 149). But Lazere suggests
that the difference is more than one of style. Damrosch’s graduate students
are learning to write for an audience that demands scholarly sophistication,
and this includes a taste for analysis as a cognitive skill.
It was once assumed that anyone graduating from a liberal arts college
would have developed a taste for analysis. Certainly “critical thinking” is still
an aim of the curriculum at most undergraduate institutions. Damrosch
seems skeptical. Are writers of popular nonfiction assuming the same taste
for analysis that higher education cultivates? Or are they purposefully “dumb-
ing down” their writing for the sake of that wider audience Lazere character-
ized as having the lowest common denominator of cognitive development?
Does this mean that in self-help books, analytical argument is absent and
anecdotal evidence and reliance upon a shared conservative “mythology”
make up the rhetoric of choice? I’ll have more to say in response to this ques-
tion in chapter 2, where the primary features of the genres of popular non-
fiction are outlined, and in chapter 3, where critiques of the genre are given
greater attention. For now, I would ask that we remember that a preference
for analysis is, in fact, a preference—a matter of taste. Many examples of pop-
ular nonfiction do exhibit analytical argument and certainly a process of cul-
tural critique. But along with this, it may well be that the readers of popular
nonfiction are pleased to find books that emphasize other ways of learning
and teaching in addition to conspicuous analysis and critique.
By Whose Authority?
When a person tells an urban legend, usually someone else is credited as an
earlier teller—the “friend of a friend” pattern. This pattern is now so widely
recognized by folklorists that it has inspired its own acronym, FOAF. In my
version of “The Killer in the Backseat” above, I mentioned (without further
explanation) that “Becky told me this about a friend of hers up in New Ha-
ven.” This motif of authentication is essential to the style of the legend. It
adds significantly to the story’s credibility. On the other hand, a listener is
not usually expected to pursue the chain of transmission (as would a nosy
folklorist); the detail is included purely for the sake of lending authority to
the telling. The “authority” of this other teller is not a credentialed kind of
authority; rather, the other teller is cited as someone who has passed along a
truth, an ordinary person who does not make up stories but instead simply
relates the latest news.
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8 Introduction
The system of authentication employed by those writing popular nonfic-

tion is perhaps more complicated than this system of FOAF, but to some
extent it amounts to the same thing. On the book jackets, for example, oth-
er writers of popular nonfiction are routinely quoted as recommenders of
the jacketed work. And throughout many books, previous works by various
authors of the genre are cited and used as sources in building an argument,
much as in scholarly writing. Such “metacommentary” about the tradition
itself within any given book is an important part of the process of promot-
ing the tradition, as we shall see in chapter 2. A slightly different kind of au-
thority acknowledgment is often featured on the covers of self-help books,
however, than would typically be seen on academic books. It can be seen in
the degree abbreviation—Ph.D. or M.D.—that often follows the principal
author’s name; the ghostwriter/second author is usually a published writer
but not a credentialed authority. Scholarly books rarely announce the au-
thor’s degree on the front cover since it is assumed that the author has an
advanced degree.
It is this need to identify the authors of such books as “authorities” that so
disturbs Wendy Kaminer in her 1992 critique of the genre, I’m Dysfunctional,
You’re Dysfunctional. I shall address Kaminer’s critique more directly in later
chapters, but for now we can acknowledge her complaint that the authors or
publishers of popular nonfiction seem convinced that their readers are look-
ing for people who can speak with authority, people who have better answers
than they could come up with on their own. The easiest way to assure read-
ers that an author is such an authority is to cite credentials (degrees) or in-
clude résumé-like details of past responsibilities in a brief biography. These,
along with the book jacket recommendations, are convincing proof for the
book buyer that the writer will have something worthwhile to say.
There is a temptation to view the entire enterprise of producing popular
nonfiction as simply another profit-motivated business, like television or
movie-making. The proof of the writers’ “authority” is included to entice
readers to buy the product, playing, as Kaminer suggests, on the readers’
desire that someone else with authority tell them what to do. My own an-
swer to this complaint is to view the buying of such books less as just anoth-
er consumer activity and more as an exercise in self-education. There is a long
tradition of self-education in America, and Joseph F. Kett, in his exhaustive
1994 historical study of the subject, The Pursuit of Knowledge under Difficul-
ties: From Self-Improvement to Adult Education in America, 1750–1990, points
to advantages individuals seeking to thus improve themselves have in tap-
ping a known commodity—an expert—as a guide in their pursuit. There is
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Introduction 9
an element of consumerism, but, as with instruction or advice offered in a

regular classroom, it is up to the consumers (students) to decide whether
what they are learning is worthwhile, no matter what kind of tributes were
paid to the teacher or writer before the class began or the book was bought.
What Oft Was Thought

The familiar is not only comfortable but also necessary for things to be un-
derstood. Consider my version of “The Killer in the Backseat.” There are
many elements of the cultural frame of reference that allow the story to
“work” as a narrative. Some parts of the cultural frame of reference are sim-
ply words or concepts that are shared as part of our “cultural literacy,” as E. D.
Hirsch (1987) would say—things such as our understanding of time and when
people are normally home, what an automobile horn is and when one would
use it, what it means to run a red light, and so on. Other elements of the
cultural frame of reference that I have found particularly significant in oral
narrative performances (see my Literary Folkloristics and the Personal Nar-
rative) include more abstract features such as stereotypes, prejudices, cus-
toms, or beliefs.
In the case of “The Killer in the Backseat,” it is necessary that listeners, like
the story’s “victim,” assume that the person following the victim in the sec-
ond car is male and that he intends the victim harm. As far as I know, the
story has never been told with a man as the “victim” in the first car. Notions
about gendered behavior and gender stereotypes are essential to the story. It
is required that the listener share the teller’s assumption that the male fol-
lowing the woman in the second car is a predator and that the husband would
try to protect her from him if possible. Furthermore, for the story to be ef-
fective, both my listeners and I must share such ideas as “One way to escape
from someone following you in a car is to run red lights, even though that is
illegal” or “Two o’clock in the morning is not a good time to be out at night,
especially if you are female” or “A man will come out of his house to see
what’s going on if he hears a horn blowing.”
Similarly, in books of popular nonfiction, there will be many allusions to
the cultural frame of reference. In effect, deciphering these allusions is my first
task as a folklorist, since almost all of these elements of the cultural frame
could be considered folklore. In chapters 5, 6, and 7, I look at some of the
prominent kinds of folklore used in books of popular nonfiction—proverbs
and sayings, personal and traditional narratives, traditional ideas and parts
of a common worldview, and some of the motifs characteristic of popular
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10 Introduction
nonfiction itself. I am convinced that the wealth of traditional materials—the

comfortable frame of reference tied to an already familiar American culture—
is significant in explaining why these books are so popular. People like to hear
“what oft was thought” and to be drawn into a discussion along familiar lines
before being introduced to anything new. Successful writers of popular non-
fiction do this very effectively by highlighting elements of our shared cultur-
al frame of reference.
Maintaining the Stability of Culture

In 1954, Berkeley anthropologist William Bascom wrote for the Journal of
American Folklore his now classic article, “Four Functions of Folklore.” He
suggested that four general functions folklore serves are amusement or es-
cape, validating culture, education, and maintaining conformity. He went on
to say that the one overarching function of all folklore is to maintain the sta-
bility of culture. If we look at an example of folklore, such as “The Killer in
the Backseat,” we can see all four of the functions Bascom lists as possible
interpretations of what is going on when the legend is passed along in a
specific context, such as the one I described earlier. We can also see why Bas-
com would argue that the legend serves the overarching function of “main-
taining the stability of culture.” Stability is achieved in part by keeping what
is already in place and working well, in place and working well. In other
words, often folklore is a conservative force; it is there to ensure that what is
a part of the culture stays a part of the culture.
In this light, “The Killer in the Backseat” stays a part of the culture pre-
cisely because it keeps certain beliefs, customs, attitudes, and stereotypes alive.
Even though it varies from one telling to another, it is stable enough in con-
tent to serve as a vehicle for maintaining the stability of culture. People who
pass along the legend are not consciously maintaining the stability of cul-
ture, but Bascom would argue that this is the legend’s function nonetheless.
For example, one traditional assumption maintained by the story is that
women should not be out alone at night. Why? The legend also implies that
our culture is a violent one, that many men are predators, that women need
protection. The legend also preserves the more positive belief that a good man
will assume the risk of protecting a woman he doesn’t even know. And the
rescuer was at some risk. He may have been wrong. He may have been per-
ceived as simply harassing the woman himself, especially if the man in the
backseat was there with the woman’s permission—perhaps an inebriated
friend she was giving a ride home. But the legend serves to maintain soci-
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Introduction 11
ety’s belief that there should be some men noble enough to take on that risk
and protect those who need their protection.
The legend doesn’t solve the problem of violence in American culture; in
fact, it serves to maintain the assumption that violence is inevitable. And
while the hero-rescuer motif is preserved as well, the worrisome effect of
gender stereotypes is maintained with a vengeance. Folklore, in this instance,
is a conservative force. But what of popular nonfiction literature? Is it, too,
simply a conservative force, one that maintains the stability of the culture we
already have? My answer to that is one that moves us to a consideration of
the genre itself—the self-help book as a historical phenomenon emerging out
of the 1960s and early 1970s and continuing in full force into the new mil-
lennium.
Collectively, books of popular nonfiction do, I think, maintain the stability
of culture; they do ensure that some elements of past and current culture will
be preserved into the next century, the next generation. But, to return to the
self-help book’s structural formula mentioned earlier, the problem or “lack”
to which each self-help book is offered as a solution is formulated as a critique
of the existing culture. As in any critique, the authors of self-help books select
those elements of the culture that they believe need to be changed, and at the
same time they highlight and reinforce those elements that serve in a positive
way their own suggested solution. Popular nonfiction, then, does selectively
maintain what is necessary and deemed “good” from the prevailing worldview.
But self-help books are not simply straightforward expressions of worldview;
they are works of analysis and interpretation and offer a cultural critique.
And in this cultural critique lies a clue to the popularity of these books of
self-enlightenment. In the 1920s and 1930s, the fields of anthropology and folk-
lore were immersed in the theories and practice of ethnography—collecting
data and observing behavior in the field. By the 1960s, the subtext of a critique
of Western culture so apparent in these ethnographies was emerging in popu-
lar writings as well—in books of popular nonfiction that carried on an exam-
ination of contemporary American worldview through a less rigorous yet tell-
ing comparison between modern Americans and earlier or less “sophisticated”
peoples. George E. Marcus and Michael J. Fischer, in Anthropology as Cultural
Critique, write, “They—primitive man—have retained a respect for nature, and
we have lost it (the ecological Eden); they have sustained close, intimate, satis-
fying communal lives, and we have lost this way of life (the experience of com-
munity); and they have retained a sense of the sacred in everyday life, and we
have lost this (spiritual vision)” (1986, 129). Much of the lament in self-help
books is, as in this academic study, a lament for what has been lost, and there
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12 Introduction
is a call to reinstate certain traditions and beliefs that have been unwisely aban-
doned or neglected.
Writing as Performance in Context

I prefaced my recounting of “The Killer in the Backseat” with a brief descrip-
tion of a possible context—sitting at the kitchen table at my sister’s house,
along with my sister and her neighbor. The unelaborated references to Becky
(my sister-in-law), New Haven, and Fort Wayne all presume upon knowledge
shared by the individuals in that particular context. But the role of context
in performance is more extensive than such simple allusions to shared knowl-
edge would suggest. As a storyteller, I can assume that my listeners are not
simply using our shared frame of reference to understand what is happen-
ing in the story; I can assume that they are learning something new as an
interpretation emerges in that specific context.
And I can, if I stop to analyze the telling, realize that I am allowing a per-
formance to emerge in that particular context that is uniquely suited to that
context and my personal performance goals. For example, in the story I in-
clude the unobtrusive detail that the woman’s husband doesn’t go to the party
with her because he has the flu. My inclusion of this detail represents to some
extent my understanding of the world (most men would not send their wives
off to a party alone unless something such as an illness interfered), and it also
represents my “reading” of my audience (my listeners would find the idea
of a woman going off to a party late at night without her husband a little
unrealistic; it would take away from the credibility of the story).
Listeners hearing my telling of “The Killer in the Backseat” will under-
stand the story in a way that depends much upon what they, their culture,
and the immediate situation bring along to that brief storytelling session.
I can assume that my listeners will “hear” the stereotypes we share; I can
assume that they will know after I reveal that there was a man hidden in
the backseat that the story is over; I can assume that they will think twice
about leaving their cars unlocked the next time they go anywhere. These
and many other revelations emerge as the story is told. Usually we pay lit-
tle attention to them; they simply add up to our vague sense of the “mean-
ing” we think we are conveying as storytellers or believe we are hearing as
listeners. In general, we are so unconsciously immersed in our culture, in
our personal situation, even in the specific context of the telling, that we
are unaware of the effect that context has on our understanding of the story
we tell or the story we hear.
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Introduction 13
The writers and readers of popular nonfiction are immersed as well in a

context, and that context has its effects. In this case, the actual response of
the reader may be delayed, but the intimate connection between the content
of the book and the context surrounding its writing and reading is still ob-
vious. If a culturally charged word such as “God” or “spirit” is used in a book,
the cultural frame of reference shared by the writer and reader comes into
play, but so does the personal understanding of the reader. The reader’s cul-
tural and personal backgrounds are significant elements of the context in
which the book is read. In an oral context, the storyteller can manipulate a
number of performance characteristics such as timing, setting, visual cues,
and gestures (see Bauman, 1992). But when a writer offers a book to a read-
er, any management of the content by the author or publisher must be ac-
complished through the words of the text itself. As they are writing, the au-
thors have their only opportunity to really use the context they share with
their readers. After that, the rest is up to the readers.
What this means for the popular nonfiction enterprise is that the con-
text for the reception of popular nonfiction books is ultimately a phenom-
enon and influence shared by the author and the reader, even though the
marketing division of the publisher may make great efforts to influence that
context as well. It is the reader who decides to buy and read a given book,
and it is the reader who does or does not incorporate the “content” of the
book into his or her own body of knowledge. If we view the reading of a
popular nonfiction book as the reception of a performance in context, we
must regard the context as one over which the reader has had some element
of choice. The decision to read the book and the reader’s response to it are
both aspects of what Allen Tough and a number of other researchers would
call “self-directed education.” Much of how the writer’s “performance” is
accepted and understood depends upon the reader’s values that guided in
the selection of the book and its reading. Reader-response theory (see Tomp-
kins, 1980) in literary studies and performance theory in folklore simply
reinforce the assertion that the meaning of a text is never solely in the hands
of the writer.
One consequence of this is that readers create a mental list of books and
writers they particularly enjoy. They read certain books over and over again,
and they eagerly await new books by their favorite authors. In effect, they
create for themselves what educators would call a “learning project” or per-
sonalized system of educational planning, a “self-directed” course of study
that emerges from the specific context created by the reader’s past and cur-
rent situation. It is this self-educational context tied to the individual reader
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14 Introduction
that is the new element in this emerging popular culture performance. I shall
examine the relationship between self-education and popular nonfiction
more closely in chapter 1.
Innovation, Transformation, Enlightenment

Popular nonfiction offers a critique of culture, a challenge to some of its tra-
ditional beliefs, and it offers a process of transformation or innovation as well.
Twenty years ago, as the discipline of folklore was reexamining some of its
primary assumptions, Barre Toelken posed what he called the “twin laws”
of folklore process (1996, 39). According to this law, the presentation of folk-
lore will routinely involve both the conservation of tradition and the inno-
vation of new material or practice. Sometimes the person presenting the item
of folklore will try to conserve tradition as faithfully as possible; sometimes
the new presentation will seem far removed from its “original.” Someone
retelling “The Killer in the Backseat” will typically try to be true to the source.
And yet, as Richard Bauman says of oral performance generally, the impact
of the individual performer in a given context must always be taken into
account. Otherwise, Bauman argues, “when one views the item of folklore
as the collective product and possession of society at large, the performer is
reduced to the role of passive and anonymous mouthpiece or conduit for the
collective tradition” (1986, 8). Each telling, even of a traditional story such
as “The Killer in the Backseat,” incorporates the teller’s personal response
to what he or she perceives to be the full and significant context, and each
performance is unique.
The authors of self-help books are eager to preserve and use whatever is
useful from the past, but the programs or strategies they offer in their books
are touted as “new.” In the publishing world, if it is not new, it is plagiarism.
It is incumbent on each author to present not necessarily a new theme but a
new scheme. In fact, as we shall see, there is a fairly standard set of themes
shared by the writers. Nevertheless, as with the authors of novels who dip into
the storehouse of universal themes, these authors must create original and
effective vehicles for presenting those themes. It is at this level that the books
of popular nonfiction are most clearly seen as literary performances. Indi-
vidual authors are entering an expressive arena as surely as they are entering
a marketplace for didactic advice-giving. In chapter 2, I shall address some
of the ways in which the writers of self-help books perform as authors in-
tent upon expressing their own creativity as well as serving as teachers for
their readers, and in chapters 5 and 8, I shall take up again the issue of what
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Introduction 15
I am calling here “creative cultural plagiarism,” the often unacknowledged

presentation of traditional material in newly authored texts.
Discovering Shared Assumptions

Taken collectively, the many urban legends that circulate in American cul-
ture (and throughout the world) contribute to a shared worldview; they serve
to maintain the stability of culture. Every time I repeat a legend such as “The
Killer in the Backseat”—no matter that I am doing so in a context of aca-
demic illustration—I add another chink to the wall of accepted violence,
tolerated gender stereotypes, and unexamined mistrust already so much a
part of the American worldview, what Linda Dégh, in her recent study of the
legend, calls “the culture of fear.” Still, as an educator, I have the opportuni-
ty to invite, even require, examination of those shared stereotypes and as-
sumptions that comprise an American worldview. Together my students and
I can hold the legend up to the light of reason and, more important, place it
into the flask of compassion and see if it can be transformed into something
of didactic value—an educational alchemy. “The Killer in the Backseat” can
teach us something about ourselves and perhaps through its mixture of re-
alism and fantasy inspire us to change the very “realities” we have accepted
as part of our belief system.
This is precisely what the writers of popular nonfiction are trying to do;
this is why I regard them as educators rather than merely opportunists
jumping on the bandwagon of a profitable publishing enterprise. And,
while I wouldn’t go so far as to say along with Marilyn Ferguson that there
is a “conspiracy” to support human social and spiritual evolution, I would
argue that there is emerging from this boom in self-help literature a sense
of community and a passionate drive toward enlightenment. Awareness of
ideas, motifs, and beliefs already shared is a central part of this enlighten-
ment. In chapters 5 through 8, I shall survey some of these traditional ele-
ments and examine how individuals creatively adapt them as they build
their personal philosophies.
Experiential Reading: The Book as Text

Many years ago, folklorist Alan Dundes suggested that folklorists should al-
ways try to discover what people listening to an example of folklore thought
the item meant. He called the methodological concept “oral literary criticism”
(1966). It would be helpful indeed if we had a record of what people who hear
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16 Introduction
“The Killer in the Backseat” think the story says about American culture,
about human nature, about gender differences. It would also be helpful if we
had some sense of whether the teller is aware of the folkloristic nature of the
story—if, for example, the teller commented in some way on the form of
legends, saying something like, “You know, there’s always a weird twist at the
end,” or, “You know, there’s always a friend of a friend.” Dundes called this
second concept “metafolklore,” and he thought that both concepts together
spoke to the neglected reflexive nature of much folklore.
Similarly, the writers and readers of popular nonfiction are aware of the
tradition in which they are participating by virtue of writing or reading self-
help books. In effect, the writers and readers have already done, in a natural
context, what other researchers and I are doing through more formal means.
Books such as Gary Greenberg’s Self on the Shelf: Recovery Books and the Good
Life (1994) or the Garland annotated bibliography on American Popular Psy-
chology: An Interdisciplinary Research Guide by Stephen B. Fried (1994) or The
Authoritative Guide to Self-Help Books by John W. Santrock, Ann M. Minnett,
and Barbara D. Campbell (1994) bring recognition to the ideational and lit-
erary pattern represented by the abundance of self-help books in our culture.
Writers are aware of other writers, and readers are aware of the variety of
books and authors available to them. The genre is an “emic” one; it is a genre
named and recognized by the readers and writers themselves.
The genre is recognized, and yet the writers, readers, bibliographers, and
researchers all appreciate as well the fact that each book is a separate and
unique text, one that reflects the individual skills of the writer and represents
a particular expression, a distinctive work. The experience of reading a well-
developed book of popular nonfiction can be like the experience of reading
a poem. I have not taken the time (and it would take much time and effort)
to collect readers’ responses to individual texts. What I will offer in this study
is some discussion of the process of reception as well as my own literary crit-
ical response to some of the many works I have read for this project. I believe
that in many instances, the quality of writing exhibited by these texts warrants
both practical and literary attention. And I think that the readers, the people
who buy these books and keep them in print, are themselves thus bringing a
previously unrecognized discernment to their reading and voicing their own
approval of the talents and efforts the writers bring to this enterprise.
Seeking Wisdom
Bascom argued that education was one of the four general functions of folk-
lore. Those listening to a person telling a version of “The Killer in the Back-
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Introduction 17
seat” can be educated in an obvious way: they can learn to always check their
backseats; they can remember the story as an important cautionary tale.
Beyond this, however, listeners can also ponder the story, perhaps challeng-
ing in their own thinking some of the traditional ideas woven into the story
and coming away instead with a new sense of how the world might work if
we only tried to be more aware of our actions and beliefs.
The readers of self-help literature will have a similar opportunity to in-
corporate some new insights into their understanding of the world with each
book they read. The writers, in their own way, will have that opportunity as
well, for they are educating themselves even as they spell out their thoughts
for their readers. The process of self-education is parallel in many ways to
the age-old process of folklore transmission, folklore performance. The in-
dividual is both a part of a community and a solitary learner. Both aspects
of the process are necessary—the communal and traditional, the unique and
individual, the conservative and the innovative, the popular and the personal.
In the chapters that follow, I shall address some of these issues in more
detail, bringing into the discussion examples from the many texts I have read
for this study. My own readers will likely have other examples from texts I
have not included or have failed to notice. This, of course, is precisely the
beauty of such self-directed learning. My hope is that I have provided a frame-
work of analysis that shines a light on the heart of this process—the creative
use of cultural resources toward a goal of self-education.
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000.Intro.1-18/Dolby 18 2/7/05, 10:15 AM
1. American Popular Self-Education
My model for disciplined self-reflection—my grandmother, writing her daily

entries in her diary—did not consider herself part of a literary tradition. She
thought and wrote for her own sake with no intention that anyone else would
read her thoughts. The writers of popular nonfiction are by definition inten-
tional “authors” with every desire that their works be widely read and wide-
ly sold, even become best-sellers. This tradition of the popular nonfiction pa-
perback has not always been a part of the American publishing scene. Just
as German literary historian Rolf Engelsing argued in Der Burger als Leser
that in Europe, the nature of reading as an activity was itself transformed by
the greater availability of books in the nineteenth century (see Davidson, 1989,
15), we could argue here that the growth of the paperback book industry in
the 1960s changed the nature of book buying and consumption in America.
The low price and easy availability of paperback books in the past four de-
cades means that readers can now easily buy books that, with little regard for
cost, they may or may not read, may never finish, may sell to a used-book-
seller or recycle at a garage sale, or may keep and treasure while buying a
second or third copy to give to friends. The convenient technology and boom-
ing marketplace have supported the growth of popular literature, both fiction
and nonfiction. It will be interesting to see how the Internet and desktop
publishing will affect our literary behavior over the next few decades. The
last half of the twentieth century may well represent a unique period in pub-
lishing history, one that fostered this boom in nonfiction paperbacks. But
there are other catalysts that have in particular spurred the development of
a popular nonfiction tradition in America, especially nonfiction usually des-
ignated (often on the back cover) as “self-help” or spiritual enrichment. Four
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20 self-help books
elements are significant as we try to account for the burgeoning of this tra-
dition in the latter half of the twentieth century: (1) individuality and the
concept of self in community as part of the American worldview; (2) the
tradition of adult self-education in America; (3) the literary tradition of the
didactic essay; and (4) the new paradigm of social activism. These influences
have steered the development of this popular literary tradition, and our fuller
understanding of each can help us explain, in part, America’s infatuation with
the self-help book.
The Self and Community in American Society and History

A striking characteristic of nearly all of the works of popular nonfiction on
bookstore shelves today is the focus on the individual, either directly as in
self-help books or indirectly as in books of popular science or spirituality in
which the enlightenment of the individual (in contrast to expansion of a
discipline) is the objective. This attention to the self is significant; it is the
selling factor behind this flourishing industry. And yet the notion of self in-
voked by these writers is not uniform. Represented in these books are at least
four concepts of self that differ from one another in significant ways and
determine to some extent the direction of argument presented by the authors.
I shall call these four concepts the obligated self, the social self, the wounded
self, and the detached self.
One of the earliest works to articulate the now-famous notion of “rugged
individualism” as the predominant American character trait was the treatise
Democracy in America by French philosopher Alexis de Tocqueville, published
in 1835. In fact, though the concept of individualism had been around since
the seventeenth century, it was not until Tocqueville undertook his study of
American culture that a term seemed to be needed to describe this seeming-
ly ubiquitous personality trait shared by all Americans (see Stewart and Ben-
nett, 1991, 133–36). Much has been made of Tocqueville’s concern with the
dominance of individualism over community, especially in the popular 1985
study by Robert N. Bellah, Richard Madsen, William M. Sullivan, Ann Swidler,
and Steven M. Tipton titled Habits of the Heart, a phrase they borrowed from
Tocqueville. As can be guessed from the subtitle—Individualism and Commit-
ment in American Life—Bellah and his colleagues view the historical strength
of individualism in America as a worrisome challenge to the more tradition-
al sense of commitment to community and to the general good of “others”
in the nation.
Their concern echoes the dichotomy and worry of another nineteenth-
century thinker, German sociologist Ferdinand Tönnies, whose classic work
01.Ch01.19-34/Dolby 20 2/7/05, 10:16 AM

American Popular Self-Education 21
Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft (1887) posits the collective and cooperative

notion of community (Gemeinschaft) against the individualistic notion of
society, the isolation and self-centeredness of the single individual in the
competitive marketplace (see Lasch, 1991, 139–43). And Bellah and his asso-
ciates are not wrong—Americans do find it hard to abandon their individu-
alism in favor of community. This is no more clearly apparent than in a con-
trast with the Amish, a religious group within the United States that explicitly
maintains its opposition to the “doctrine” of individualism and insists, in-
stead, that members suppress signs of individualism or “at least find fulfill-
ment through collective objectives rather than personal ones,” as Donald B.
Kraybill argues (1989, 18). Except for such purposefully deviant groups as the
Amish, Americans seem indeed to have embraced the notion of individual-
ism and its veneration of the self since the earliest days of the Republic.
What this has meant for our study of popular nonfiction—of self-help
books—is that an underlying assumption of all such books is the prominence
of the self. Historically, Americans are attuned to the solo voice rather than
the chorus; they expect writers to address the needs of the individual first and
the community second. It is not that they—writers or readers—have no con-
cern with community; instead, it is simply a matter of viewing the individu-
al, the self, as the first order of business. Individuals must have their own
house in order before they can sally forth to serve the community.
According to Sacvan Bercovitch, the Puritans were bound together by a
“concept of representative selfhood.”1 Little wonder, then, that from the ear-
liest days, Americans have felt a need to scrutinize the self and worry over
the actions of the individual as they do or do not further the individual’s
progress along the path toward personal salvation. This attachment to the
self shows up most clearly in a sense of obligation to improve the self. For
example, in a well-known parable in the New Testament (Matthew 25), Jesus
tells of the “wicked and slothful servant” who failed to invest the one talent
that had been left to him and instead hid it in the ground. This story is often
interpreted as a judgment against those who do not work to improve upon
what they have been given; in other words, the individual has an obligation
toward self-improvement. God expects us to seek to better ourselves, or so
the roots of Puritanism would have us believe.
Among the current writers of popular nonfiction, it is in fact often the self-
proclaimed Christian writers, such as Stephen Covey or Scott Peck, who as-
sume from the very beginning that the need or obligation for self-improve-
ment is a given. Their concept of self is not so much that of a sin-ridden soul
in the hands of an angry God (the Puritan image made famous by Jonathan
Edwards) but rather that of a favored and blessed servant who does as God
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22 self-help books
expects, investing himself or herself in the worthy actions of progress and

self-improvement. This first concept of self casts individualism as a prima-
ry and necessary focus, a personal responsibility, a means by which individ-
uals meets their obligations to improve upon the raw materials God has given.
This notion of the “obligated self” encourages a kind of introspection and
programmatic effort reminiscent of traditional Christian regimens, Protes-
tant or Catholic (as well as those central to other religious traditions). The
focus is on the behavior and spiritual growth of the individual alone, espe-
cially as he or she is tested by the demands of the world.
A second concept of self recognizes the individual as accountable to soci-
ety and therefore requires a balance between “rugged individualism” and
community. Writers who adopt this concept offer suggestions for achieving
self-fulfillment within the context of the larger community. This is the ideal
of the balanced private/public self that many of the interviewees in the book
by Bellah and his colleagues seek for themselves. There is still the same sense
of obligation to invest the self or the soul as in the first concept, but now there
is in addition a social obligation. As Anthony de Mello says, good works,
charity, and service to the community are undertaken from the perspective
of “enlightened self-interest” (1990, 20). Individuals will feel more content
with their stewardship of the self if life includes some clear response to the
needs of society.
This sense of social obligation is not so much a moral stance as a wise in-
vestment strategy, to return to the parable from the Book of Matthew. Writ-
ers of contemporary nonfiction who invoke this concept of the self see co-
operation with society as a sound practice policy, a recognition of nature as
it really is. They perceive that society is a hierarchy and that the wise person
is the one who can balance self-interest and cooperation with the systems he
or she encounters. Many of the writers who address their books to the cor-
porate world are particularly aware of this social aspect of the self. Peter M.
Senge in his widely read Fifth Discipline: The Art and Practice of the Learning
Organization (1990) articulates a vision of “the learning organization” as part
of a “profound evolution in the nature of work as a social institution,” and
within that vision the individual is charged with the responsibility to learn
the systems that will lead to self- and corporate improvement.2
Others writers have adopted this view of the self, including Spencer John-
son and Kenneth Blanchard, whose One Minute Manager (1981) has sparked
a series of books that instruct the individual in ways to balance personal and
community needs. Almost always, achieving this balance involves learning and
accepting one’s place within a system that includes others. Mihaly Csikszent-
mihalyi writes, “A person who wants to make a creative contribution not only
01.Ch01.19-34/Dolby 22 2/7/05, 10:16 AM

must work within a creative system but must also reproduce that system with-
in his or her mind. In other words, the person must learn the rules and the
content of the domain, as well as the criteria of selection, the preferences of
the field” (1995, 47). And by “the field” he means very specifically the people
who maintain the system within which the creative individual works.
The selves in this case are obligated to use talents they have been given, and
through their own attachments and systems of response, they are tied to a
community that offers a context for their efforts. This concept of self is clearly
situated within a social world. The “social self” is instructed to be aware of
community as a system to which a clear strategy of response can be and must
be devised. It is a self that strives for commitment to and balance among, as
Susan Jeffers says, the many and varied components of life, not simply per-
sonal growth (1987, chap. 8). At the level of academic philosophy, this con-
cept of self is the one that serves the investigation of identity and morality
and much of the language of contemporary discourse.3
The third concept of self is the one most commonly adopted by the au-
thors of “popular psychology” books, by writers trained in the field of psy-
chology. One might think of this concept of self as the “psychological self,”
but in fact almost always the concept involved sees the self as “wounded” or
at least severely misled by the dysfunctional culture that feeds it. It is this
concept of the self that so offends Wendy Kaminer—a view of self as victim,
the wounded inner child, the “survivor,” the codependent, the needy addict.
Gary Greenberg in his study The Self on the Shelf argues that this often-in-
voked concept of the self represents a denial of the importance of “the Oth-
er,” clearly at the base of modern philosophical discourse—the social self
mentioned above.
The “wounded self” is immersed in culture but unable to relate to others
in a healthy way. It is not surprising that many psychologists writing books
of popular nonfiction view the self as wounded and in need of repair. The
medical model of their discipline would seem to require such a notion. A
cure comes in treating the wounded self, in analyzing the determining ef-
fects of culture, psyche, and personal history on the psychological state of
the individual, not in addressing the connections between the individual and
his or her community. James Redfield’s popular Celestine Prophecy builds
upon an understanding of the self as controlled by the circumstances of
family “dramas,” at least until enlightenment comes in the form of psycho-
logical education.
A fourth concept of the self is closely related to the third but casts a more
optimistic portrait of the health or strength of the soul or spirit at the core
of the self. This fourth view of the self is influenced by Eastern thinking. It
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24 self-help books
combines a sense of detachment with an understanding of “the god with-

in,” or the notion that the self is indomitable and should act that way. I call
this the “detached self.” Some writers, such as Wayne Dyer or Ivan Hoffman,
posit this observing or detached self as the ideal into which we can grow or
perhaps to which we can return. This concept of self is closer to the notion
of “soul” or “spirit”—the pure manifestation of the divine within every in-
dividual, reminiscent of Wordsworth’s “child” in “Intimations of Immortal-
ity” or of Emerson’s “oversoul.”
A recent expansion of this concept is in the supposedly “channeled” book
Conversations with God: An Uncommon Dialogue by Neale Donald Walsch.
Like Jane Roberts some years earlier, Walsch claims to be simply taking dic-
tation from a conversation with God (with Jane Roberts, it was a spirit named
Seth). In Walsch’s first book (there are several in the series), God tells him,
“Upon entering the physical universe, you relinquished your remembrance of
yourself. . . . You are, have always been, and will always be, a divine part of the
divine whole, a member of the body. That is why the act of rejoining the whole,
of returning to God, is called remembrance” (1995, 28, emphasis in original).
In Walsch’s book, God is the detached self, the observing spirit who knows
all of life and of whom we are all a part, though we have forgotten. Though
other writers may not take the notion quite so far as Walsch, those who adopt
the concept of a detached self do share his understanding of the self as a di-
vine soul capable of stepping aside from those attachments to the world that
make us seem less divine than we are. Such writers hope to guide readers
toward that lost but always-possible state of detachment. The detached self
is one of potentiality.
The reliance upon these four concepts of self in the growing body of pop-
ular nonfiction underscores the personal aspect of the subject matter. Wheth-
er feeling obligated, social, wounded, or detached, the selves that read these
books are presumed to be taking up these readings because the authors speak
to their personal worries or needs and to their desire for a clearer sense of
who they are, the nature of their world, and what they are doing here. In other
words, the readers of popular nonfiction see their reading as part of a pro-
cess of self-education through which they will learn more about the “selves”
these writers have offered to help define, enlighten, and perhaps transform.
The Tradition of Adult Self-Education

Many of the products associated with American popular culture are intend-
ed to entertain—movies, music CDs, television shows, comic books, paper-
back novels. But the books we are considering here—books of popular non-
01.Ch01.19-34/Dolby 24 2/7/05, 10:16 AM

fiction—are intended to educate the reader. Readers buy them not for their
entertainment value but rather for their utility in various self-initiated pro-
grams of self-education. The tradition of self-education has been a part of
American culture from the very beginning. Joseph Kett, in his study The
Pursuit of Knowledge under Difficulties, traces the emergence of the more
inclusive tradition of adult education out of the various societies for self-
improvement that were a part of American culture from colonial days, phe-
nomena like the well-known Chautauqua movement. The nonfiction paper-
backs that have become so popular in the last four decades are a part of this
tradition as well but a part that has usually been overlooked in research on
adult education.
In Adults as Learners: Increasing Participation and Facilitating Learning
(1981), K. Patricia Cross reviews the work of researchers such as Allen Tough
and Malcolm S. Knowles who have focused on the phenomenon of “self-
directed learning.”4 One of the striking features of adult education general-
ly but self-directed learning in particular is that it is problem-oriented. As
Knowles explains, the adult “comes into an educational activity largely be-
cause he is experiencing some inadequacy in coping with current life prob-
lems. He wants to apply tomorrow what he learns today, so his time perspec-
tive is one of immediacy of application. Therefore, he enters into education
with a problem-centered orientation to learning” (1978, 58). The book of
popular nonfiction, with its typical problem/solution structure, is a likely
candidate for such self-directed learning. In fact, it would seem that such
books become necessary as adult learners recognize their inadequacy in ad-
dressing on their own the kinds of problems featured in self-help books.
Though Wendy Kaminer found this very reliance upon experts a shameful
selling out of the much-vaunted American individualism, it seems an hon-
est and utilitarian response to the nature of adult learning. Cross tells us that
“self-directed learning is likely to be inefficient if the learner cannot define
what he wants to know or needs help in locating the relevant resources. In
such instances, the learner will be dependent on outside help” (1981, 194).
These are precisely the two things that the author of a nonfiction book can
do for readers—clarify the problem and offer an interpretative integration
of sources as part of the solution.
The writer helps readers in this way but does not, on the other hand, take
away the readers’ initiative as “planners” of their own “learning projects.” These
terms—planner and learning project—are borrowed from Allen Tough’s re-
search on self-directed study among adults. In effect, by adopting these terms,
we redefine the process of selecting and reading books of popular nonfiction
as a freely chosen and deliberate educational endeavor planned by the reader,
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26 self-help books
not simply a consumer response to effective marketing. Readers include the

books they read as part of a planned reading program—a learning project—
that they themselves design. Granted, they likely will not write out a syllabus,
nor even keep a written bibliography, but for their own purposes they will have
constructed “learning projects” that are accomplished as the various books they
choose are purchased, borrowed, read, or rejected.
We might say that readers of popular nonfiction create their own curric-
ula and course designs and independently integrate the various readings into
cumulative “projects” that address the problems that motivated their read-
ing in the first place. What they come to “know,” then, is what they them-
selves accept as true from what they have read. They construct their own
learning—at least on the subject of their project—through the process of self-
directed reading.5 Readers of self-help books are active learners; though they
are not responding in a seminar nor experientially observing in the field, they
are nonetheless the ones who choose the readings and move through their
self-directed programs at the pace they set.
And the books they choose can be powerful components of the self-edu-
cation program these readers adopt. Joseph Kett reports a belief, strongly
adhered to by those who pursued self-education a century ago, that “books
would transform individuals, almost like a conversion experience” (1994,
160). Certainly it is the aim of many writers that their readers, upon reading
their books, be transformed and converted from their old unenlightened
selves into new “improved” and educated individuals.6 For most modern
writers, there is a recognition that their readers are seeking wisdom through
their process of reading. Their readers are not hoping to learn an academic
discipline or body of information; instead, they are hoping to solve a per-
ceived problem. The literary tradition that lends itself to that process is an
old one.
The Literary Tradition of the Didactic Essay

The popular nonfiction tradition is a part of the literary tradition, not a
branch of research or scholarship, though many of these popular paperbacks
make use of scholarly sources and sophisticated research techniques and
many of the authors wear the hat of a scholar in other contexts. This distinc-
tion between scholarship and the kind of writing we are examining here is a
blurry one. Perhaps it would help if we specify the most significant differ-
ences between the two kinds of writing. Jacques Barzun and Henry F. Graff,
authors of The Modern Researcher, describe conventional scholarship as fol-
lows: “Accumulation and verification must take precedence over literary skill,
01.Ch01.19-34/Dolby 26 2/7/05, 10:16 AM

and encyclopedic thoroughness must become a commandment. To be sci-

entific, a monograph must tell all about a single small subject, and what the
work contains must aim at being definitive” (1985, 55). Not all scholarship
meets this rigid outline, but the overview does suggest ways in which popu-
lar nonfiction writing differs from scholarly writing.
Building upon the description of scholarship offered by Barzun and Graff,
I would suggest three important ways in which works of popular nonfiction
differ from scholarship. First, authors of popular nonfiction write with the
aim of articulating a problem of some personal significance to the reader and
of offering a solution, of providing helpful guidance. In contrast, scholars
hope to advance their disciplines or add to the cumulative understanding of
a specific topic. Second, popular nonfiction, like all literature, hopes to be
aesthetically appealing and to satisfy the reader’s expectations for a compe-
tent, even artistic, literary performance. Scholarship is expected to be exhaus-
tive and accurate, even to the point of tediousness if necessary. And third,
writers of popular nonfiction use illustrations that effectively convey their
ideas even at the expense of thoroughness of example (potentially invoking
the reductive fallacy), while scholars are cautious about making generaliza-
tions and hesitate to let any one instance carry too much weight, even if the
illustration is rhetorically persuasive.
This distinction between popular nonfiction and scholarship is an impor-
tant one to establish before we consider the effect the tradition of didactic
literature has had in the emergence of contemporary nonfiction. In viewing
popular nonfiction as a continuation of a literary tradition, we ascribe to the
writers the motives that inspire literature—a desire to express an idea or feel-
ing, to persuade or move an audience, even to delight—rather than the more
austere and formal motives of scholarship. Writers in the didactic tradition
do have some more practical goals than those associated with, say, fiction
writers or poets, but they do have every reason, nevertheless, to regard their
written products primarily as pieces of expressive and rhetorical writing rath-
er than scholarship.
Let us look at this didactic tradition. It is an ancient and respected one,
starting, we must assume, well before the advent of writing. Long before the
first Aesopic fables were written down, tales were told and proverbs were
prescribed by community elders, parents, and others who had reason to in-
struct or advise. One of the age-old functions of all folklore is education, and
performers who would amuse us are just as often eager to teach us as well.
On the other hand, there are those who would argue that “literature”—true
art—is never utilitarian, never purposeful, that writing intended to advise
or persuade is communication or rhetoric but not literature.
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28 self-help books
Still, the line is a fine one, and the distinction is a matter of convention.
Ancient myths, such as the story of Oedipus or the story of Noah and the
ark or the many Native American stories of Coyote and the establishment
of human practices—no less than Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream”
speech or Henry David Thoreau’s “Civil Disobedience”—involve an obvi-
ous aesthetic dimension; they are moving or entertaining as well as instruc-
tive. The didactic tradition has had to present itself in a palatable form and
remain consistently appealing to its audience; otherwise, the didactic tenden-
cy would have died out long ago.
Not surprisingly, then, this didactic tendency is alive and well in contem-
porary America—in sermons, in public television broadcasts, in the public
lecture hall, and particularly in the form of popular nonfiction paperbacks
we are examining here. The tradition can be traced back through literature
to Plato, and its most famous proponent in our more recent literary tradi-
tion is the British poet Alexander Pope, whose 1734 “Essay on Man” influenced
many early American writers. The practice of didactic writing represents the
continuation of a tradition explored and expanded by such notable Ameri-
can authors as Cotton Mather, Benjamin Franklin, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and
Henry David Thoreau.
But what of these many didactic writers today? Are they, in the opinion
of most people, writing literature? Certainly they are not writing didactic
poetry as did Pope. In general, nonfiction, especially didactic nonfiction, has
a hard time finding acceptance in the canon of respected literature. One
wonders whether Emerson’s “Self-Reliance” would be so easily accepted as
an example of literary writing now, a century and a half later. The question
is really whether the genre itself is viewed with prejudice. The authors of these
current nonfiction paperbacks vary in their skills as writers, and any would,
in my opinion, be hard-pressed to produce something as impressive as most
of Emerson’s work. Nevertheless, it is worthwhile to consider what it is they
are about, to grant them the courtesy of a serious critique within the liter-
ary tradition they represent.
William Flint Thrall, Addison Hibbard, and C. Hugh Holman offer the
following commentary on the nature of “didacticism” in A Handbook to Lit-
erature:
Instructiveness in a literary work one of the purposes of which appears to be to
give guidance, particularly in moral, ethical or religious matters. Since all liter-
ary art exists in order to communicate something—an idea, a teaching, a pre-
cept, an emotion, an attitude, a fact, an autobiographical incident, a sensation—
the ultimate question of didacticism in a literary work appears to be one of the
intent of the author or of his ostensible purpose. (1960, 144–45)
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There is little doubt that contemporary self-help or enrichment authors in-

tend their works to be instructive. What may be debatable is whether their
works represent “literature” or whether, instead, they should be considered
merely examples of “popular culture” along with the mysteries, romances,
and westerns that John Cawelti groups together. In the next chapter, we shall
address in greater depth this question of the artistry apparent in the genres
of popular nonfiction.
Whether the authors intend their works to be seen as literature or not, they
do intend them to speak to the concerns of what has come to be called “New
Age” readers. This same concern was apparent as well in an earlier “new age”
in America—Emerson’s period of transcendentalism and what Lewis Perry
calls “polite culture” that arose in the decades after the 1820s (1984, 207–59).
During that earlier time, middle-class Americans clamored to learn how to
be a more moral and enlightened people. Much of the “newness” of the pe-
riod was to be found in its promotion of the individual and “feelings,” two
phenomena celebrated variously in such works as Emerson’s essay “Self-
Reliance” and Edwards A. Park’s Theology of the Intellect and the Theology of
the Feelings, published toward the end of the period in 1850. More recently,
scholars have reassessed the effects of that period in America’s intellectual
history, especially as it has left its mark on the contemporary period. Fran-
cis L. K. Hsu, in Rugged Individualism Reconsidered, argues that “all of our
major internal problems . . . are traceable, directly or indirectly, to that much
extolled virtue of our Founding Fathers, rugged individualism” (1983, 4). On
the other hand, as mentioned earlier, Robert Bellah and his colleagues con-
tend that contemporary American values combine individualism and com-
mitment in such a way as to continue the search for an individualized, mor-
ally and spiritually sound life so central to that earlier “new age” of Emerson
and Thoreau.
What this means in the context of these many self-help and self-enlight-
enment books is that the authors of these works are able to draw upon a well-
established tradition within the popular worldview. Americans are used to
sharing a collective appreciation for “rugged individualism,” whether it is
necessarily good for us or not, and we continue to share a concern for our
moral and spiritual behavior. By virtue of this literary and cultural tradi-
tion, we share the assumption that the maintenance of these values is each
individual American’s personal responsibility, that we, taking our cue from
Emerson, must strive to be self-reliant and independent and to attend—each
of us—to our moral and spiritual growth.
It is perhaps not at all surprising that one book among the many I have
reviewed for this project is a reconsideration of Emerson’s didactic essays in
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30 self-help books
light of today’s needs, Marianne Parady’s Seven Secrets for Successful Living:
Tapping the Wisdom of Ralph Waldo Emerson to Achieve Love, Happiness, and
Self-Reliance (1995). While such modern didactic pieces are full-length books
rather than essays, they continue a tradition of didactic literature that has
always been a part of American culture. The relationship to the didactic es-
say tradition is perhaps clearest in those books that are collections of “med-
itations,” such as Anthony de Mello’s Awareness (1990) or Jon Kabat-Zinn’s
Wherever You Go, There You Are (1994). But all of them pick up the informal
tone of the personal essay and insert that tone into a book-length piece that
serves a didactic purpose.7 The result is a new kind of book, one that adopts
the tone and style of the informal essay, the problem/solution structure of
the self-directed learning project, and the function of didactic literature.
The New Paradigm of Social Activism

Embedded in the function of didactic literature is the message that we should
be about doing something—usually what traditional religious figures have
called “good works.” In her classic call to a “New Age,” Marilyn Ferguson
reviews some of the rich discussion of self-psychology in the work of Abra-
ham Maslow and pays particular heed to his warning that “a fear of know-
ing is very deeply a fear of doing, because of the responsibility inherent in
new knowledge” (1980, 146). Maslow and Ferguson seem to be in agreement
that with new knowledge comes a responsibility to do something with that
knowledge. Writers of popular nonfiction are, in effect, striving to erase the
fear people would have of “doing” what needs to be done, of “knowing” that
they are responsible. Inescapably, as Maslow argues, when a person knows
the truth, he or she will feel compelled to act to bring about the changes that
are needed. This is why various kinds of activism are a natural outgrowth of
the self-improvement crusade.
For readers of books of popular nonfiction, the first order of business may
well be changes in their own lives, often changes within the context of fam-
ily and other immediate social relationships. However, for many readers there
will be a pull toward some larger social commitment, as Bellah and his asso-
ciates found, or toward some venue for service and contribution. Giving back
to the social and physical environment is seen as essential. This is one of the
instructions often offered by the authors of self-help books. Even the most
crassly self-centered books advocate doing something for others, of engag-
ing in social, community, and environmental service. Robert J. Ringer, in
Looking Out for #1, says, “What is involved, at its highest level, is rational
selfishness—acting on the belief that the good you hope to receive in return
01.Ch01.19-34/Dolby 30 2/7/05, 10:16 AM

will be worth the time, effort and/or money you expend in doing something
for the other person” (1977, 50). Spencer Johnson says much the same thing
in One Minute for Myself (1985, 106). And these are just two of the books that
claim to be completely self-serving rather than altruistic.
The consensus is that people gain something personally from service to
others and to the earth, an idea clearly at the base of much of the communi-
ty involvement sought by people interviewed by Robert Bellah and his asso-
ciates. Wayne Dyer, in his 1997 book, Manifest Your Destiny, suggests that there
are four stages in the growth of the enlightened individual: the athlete, the
warrior, the statesperson, and the spirit. The third level—the statesperson,
or the individual who seeks to serve or make a contribution—is the one to
which most people aspire, he argues. And many writers would claim that
youth is no barrier to being a “statesperson,” that this “level” is instead a new
paradigm that may be grasped by individuals at any time. It is the stage at
which Marilyn Ferguson would describe members of the New Age “Aquar-
ian Conspiracy.” To repeat her definition: “The paradigm of the Aquarian
Conspiracy sees humankind embedded in nature. . . . It sees us as stewards
of all our resources, inner and outer. . . . The new perspective respects the
ecology of everything: birth, death, learning, health, family, work, science,
spirituality, the arts, the community, relationships, politics” (1980, 29). In
effect, the new paradigm behind much of the popular nonfiction written
today calls for some direct involvement in the process of social change.
Though this call for engagement is a tacit assumption behind much of the
writing we are examining here, we can see some significant variation just in
how the paradigm of social activism is invoked by various authors. One way
alluded to above is what Ringer called “rational selfishness.” I prefer a term
that Ram Dass borrows from the Dalai Lama—“selfish altruism.” In the pref-
ace to their book Compassion in Action, Ram Dass and Mirabai Bush offer
the following:
We are searching for a way of acting for social change in the world that is com-
patible with, in fact contributes to, psychological, intellectual, and spiritual
growth, and acknowledges that, as Gandhi said, our life is our message. We are
exploring what the Dalai Lama calls “selfish altruism”: compassionate action
is not done for others—it is done with others, for ourselves, because we can no
longer avoid it. It helps fulfill our lives. (1992, xii)
This “selfish altruism” is motivated by a desire to feel good about ourselves.

Anthony de Mello says, “Charity is really self-interest masquerading under the
form of altruism,” and he goes on to identify this altruism as a “more refined
kind of selfishness” through which “I give myself the pleasure of pleasing oth-
01.Ch01.19-34/Dolby 31 2/7/05, 10:16 AM

32 self-help books
ers” (1990, 19). He and a number of other writers are very clear about the role
social activism can play in fulfilling our own need for feeling useful. As Scott
Peck says, “Virtually anyone who joins an organization . . . does so with two
needs: to give something and to get something” (1993b, 33). Giving is as satis-
fying as getting.
A second embodiment of the paradigm is through the search for commu-
nity, for the sense of Gemeinschaft articulated by Ferdinand Tönnies in the
last century. Joseph Kett recognizes the call for “community education” in
the early part of this century as a response to the need for loyalties and at-
tachments formed within small face-to-face groups (1994, 314–15). Granted,
those offering the “education” or, in modern instances, the social service are
not really part of the group they serve. Nevertheless, they enjoy the experi-
ence of interacting within a community and of receiving the affectionate
regard of those with whom they work. Robert Coles, in The Call of Service,
writes at some length about the complexity of the relationship between vol-
unteers and the people they serve (1993, 245–53). Most striking is his obser-
vation that, when interviewed, what people “being served” noticed most was
the enthusiasm of the volunteers who served them; their “enthusiasm was
one of the qualities they most admired and for which they expressed grati-
tude.” Quite apart from the help that is given, volunteers are appreciated for
their human interaction. And not surprisingly, this engagement in a com-
munity, this meaningful social interaction, is a large part of what the volun-
teers themselves find gratifying as well.
A third illustration of the paradigm of social activism is in what innova-
tive educators in the 1960s called “experiential learning.” Wilbert J. McKea-
chie, in the tenth edition of his classic manual for college teachers, Teaching
Tips, includes a chapter on “Experiential Learning” and describes the prac-
tice as entailing “a broad spectrum of educational experiences, such as com-
munity service, fieldwork, sensitivity training groups, internships, [and] co-
operative education involving work in business or industry” (1999, 154). And
more directly, David H. Lempert has written a book (Escape from the Ivory
Tower: Student Adventures in Democratic Experiential Education [1996]) en-
tirely devoted to the development of experiential education opportunities for
college students. Many of the courses he suggests are designed to take stu-
dents into the local or global community to work with people outside the
“ivory tower” and to participate in collaborative solutions to real social and
economic problems.
Many organizations founded to serve various social and environmental
needs attract adults who adopt this same service-oriented and experiential
learning perspective—what Sam Rushforth, a conservation biologist at Brig-
01.Ch01.19-34/Dolby 32 2/7/05, 10:16 AM

ham Young University, calls “activist pedagogy” (see Dolby, 1998). Some of the
formal organizations that incorporate this view are Educators for Social Re-
sponsibility (Cambridge, Massachusetts), Learning Alliance (New York City),
Earthwatch, and Habitat for Humanity. All such organizations regard partici-
pation as a learning experience and service as a cooperative venture through
which the people served are simply aided in their own efforts. One objective—
the one that ties such groups to much of the popular nonfiction we are exam-
ining here—is to experience effectiveness as a participant, to learn how collab-
orative work, often tedious and clumsy, is actually done in an effort to bring
about needed change. A number of environmental, wildlife, and world hun-
ger groups are attractive to people who seek to learn through first-hand expe-
rience the kinds of activities that promote positive change.
A fourth avenue by which social activism has emerged in the context of
works of self-improvement and popular learning is in what has been called
“liberation theology.” Phillip Berryman has written the classic work on this
movement, and he describes liberation theology “in terms of three closely
related tasks: to reinterpret Christian faith in terms of the bleak lot of the
poor; to criticize society and its ideologies through theology; and to observe
and comment on the practices of the church itself, and of Christians” (1987,
87). One interpretation of this threefold charge is that offered by Paulo Freire,
who set about the task of teaching adult peasants not only to read and write
but also to address issues of vital importance to their lives, such as conflicts
of power and land ownership.8 The critique of society is a common theme
of many works of popular nonfiction, of course. The new element here is in
tying theology—usually specifically Christian theology—to an activist con-
demnation of poverty.
A similar notion urging activism in the cause of justice and the eradication
of poverty is behind what religious adult educator Linda Vogel identifies as the
“new earth” metaphor. She writes: “Participating in creating a new earth (the
reign and realm or kingdom of God) requires a renewed faith and engagement
in reconstructing society. People of faith are called to join together to . . . find
a new freedom to live (and if necessary, die) as they invest themselves in working
for justice” (1991, 88). The challenge to do “good works” has always been seen
as a religious obligation, but this new application of liberation theology is taken
on as an opportunity to serve by those who see injustice around them.
In many cases, one of these four kinds of social activism is apparent in the
motivation for writing or reading a given book of popular nonfiction. Some-
times this motivation is clear in the title of the book, as in Karen Kissel Wege-
la’s How to Be a Help Instead of a Nuisance: Practical Approaches to Giving
Support, Service, and Encouragement to Others (1996). Through bits and pieces
01.Ch01.19-34/Dolby 33 2/7/05, 10:16 AM

34 self-help books
of biographical detail, we learn that many of the writers of books of popular

nonfiction have participated in various social service or environmental ac-
tivities. It is not surprising that they incorporate leanings toward such in-
volvement into their books.
The popular nonfiction tradition that has expanded over the last four
decades had its beginnings in the didacticism of ancient fables and proverbs.
It has flourished for a number of reasons, but four ingredients that have been
particularly influential are American individualism and the concept of the
“self,” the tradition of adult self-education, the literary tradition of the di-
dactic essay, and the new paradigm of social activism. These factors, along
with developments in book production and marketing, the proliferation of
training and self-improvement workshops and classes, and a growing intro-
spection among those responsible for American commercial and political
activities, have encouraged the emergence of a popular nonfiction tradition.
Especially since the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, people want to
know how to solve our private and social problems.
01.Ch01.19-34/Dolby 34 2/7/05, 10:16 AM

2. The Books, the Writers,
and Metacommentary
What is a “self-help” book? The term serves to identify (very loosely) a cat-
egory of popular nonfiction. Upon checking Barnes and Noble’s web site, I
found more than 17,000 books among its holdings with “self-help” as the
subject matter. In their Authoritative Guide to Self-Help Books, John W. Sant-
rock, Ann M. Minnett, and Barbara D. Campbell surveyed 1,000 works they
categorized as books on self-help topics. They include thirty-two subcate-
gories within this larger category (ranging from abuse, addiction, and anger,
through codependency, death, and dying, to intimacy, marriage, and sexu-
ality), but they intentionally leave out books on such other topics as spiritu-
ality and medicine as well as popular books about the environment, science,
creativity, and business.
The Authoritative Guide looks primarily at books of popular psychology,
not other kinds of books that might be included in the general category of
self-help, and the authors’ objective is to offer lay people evaluations of those
books informed by the elicited comments of mental health professionals.
They do offer a definition: “Self-help books are books that are written for
the lay public to help individuals cope with problems and live more effec-
tive lives” (1994, 4). This definition is in keeping with the problem/solution
formula associated with the general category of self-help books, but in fact
the kinds of problems addressed by the books Santrock, Minnett, and Camp-
bell select are ones confined to what bibliographer Stephen B. Fried more
precisely identifies as concerns of “psychological self-help.”
It is good to be aware of the reason scholars in the field of psychology have
concerned themselves with this boom in self-help books. As is clear in the
definition offered above by the authors of the Authoritative Guide, psycho-
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36 self-help books
logical self-help books are intended to “help individuals cope” with prob-
lems, psychological problems. In fact, this objective is parallel to that of ther-
apy and psychological treatment, of the clinical practice upon which many
of the authors of self-help books draw for their rhetorically effective case
studies. At issue for many scholars in the field of psychology is the growing
use of self-help books as a part of therapy, as part of the “prescription” of-
fered by practicing therapists.
Quite reasonably, I think, such scholars are worried that patients who are
assigned or even simply encouraged to read self-help books will misdiagnose
their own problems and misuse the suggestions made in the books. Many of
the scholarly articles included in Fried’s section on “Self-Help Books” in his
annotated bibliography of American Popular Psychology address the problem
of “bibliotherapy,” the use of self-help books in therapy. With caution, how-
ever, some scholars, such as Steven Starker in his Oracle at the Supermarket:
The American Preoccupation with Self-Help Books (1989), conclude that self-
help books are already a part of the current cultural scene and that psychol-
ogists themselves need to be more aware of the values and applications con-
veyed through such books.
There is an important respect in which the larger category of “self-help
books” takes some of the pressure away from this narrow concern over the
use or misuse of such books in therapy. If we include in the category such
other kinds of books as popular offerings on alternative medicine or busi-
ness and management or books on spirituality, popular science, or creativi-
ty, then we can see that the intentions of the author and the actual use to
which the book is put by the reader may be slightly or even very different. In
other words, self-help books—specifically psychological self-help books—
may function in ways that have little to do with their actual efficacy as tools
of therapy.
What do we mean, then, by “self-help” book? In the fields of folklore and
anthropology, scholars often differentiate between “etic” and “emic” genres.
Etic genres are those categories of folklore that are identified and named by
the scholar (or the scholar’s discipline); they are used for cross-cultural com-
parative study, and usually their identifying characteristics are carefully out-
lined in a textbook definition of the genre. Thus, for example, the “legend”
is an etic category identifying a particular kind of realistic traditional story,
and scholars name such stories “legends” whenever, based on their under-
standing of the discipline’s definition of the genre, they encounter “legends”
in the field. Emic genres, on the other hand, are those categories of folklore
identified and (usually) named by the people who create or use the folklore;
02.Ch02.35-55/Dolby 36 2/7/05, 10:17 AM

Books, Writers, and Metacommentary 37
they are culture-specific and may or may not lend themselves easily to cross-
cultural comparison.1
In the case of self-help books, there are a number of groups vying for
the right to establish an agreed-upon understanding—an etic category—
for self-help books. Publishers have a stake in influencing the market through
the naming of their products; bookstores need to organize and promote their
wares in an effective and appealing way; psychologists feel the need to dis-
tinguish between scholarly research in their field and books sometimes used
in do-it-yourself therapy; and some individuals associate with a distinct ac-
tivist “self-help movement” that works with nonprofit self-help groups (this
last mentioned interest has very little to do with the books typically called
“self-help” books; see Riessman and Carroll, 1995). Who gets to say what “self-
help” really means? I have chosen to use the term because it seems closest to
the earlier, perhaps more accurate term “self-improvement” used to describe
the active intention of the reader as he or she engages in selecting and read-
ing the book. For most Americans, “self-improvement” sounds a little stuffy;
“self-help” is more direct, more honest. It describes what the reader is seek-
ing and what the reader thinks the author and publisher are selling. Popular
usage, then, allows self-help books to emerge as an emic genre, but as with
most such categories, it remains only vaguely defined. I propose to borrow
the emic term and make it a more precisely defined etic category, a popular
literary genre, the self-help book.
The Books
The word “genre,” borrowed from the French and meaning “type” or “kind,”
is often used in literary studies or art history or even the performance arts
to classify styles or forms of expressive artifacts or performance. In folklore
studies, both form and style are used in distinguishing genres but always with
attention to content and function as well. Part of what separates self-help
books from other genres of popular literature is the distinctiveness of these
last two aspects—content and function. Or, more precisely, it is the unique
combination of (1) self-improvement content; (2) an informal, rhetorical
style; (3) the general problem/solution structure within some fairly predict-
able literary forms; and (4) an educational function that sets this category
apart as a genre of popular literature and a distinct and identifiable element
of American culture.
Before we look more closely at each of these features of the genre, let me
propose a definition of self-help books modified from the one offered by
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38 self-help books
Santrock, Minnett, and Campbell in their Authoritative Guide to Self-Help

Books: Self-help books are books of popular nonfiction written with the aim
of enlightening readers about some of the negative effects of our culture and
worldview and suggesting new attitudes and practices that might lead them
to more satisfying and more effective lives. The desire for “more effective
lives” seems essential to either definition. But the definition I propose here
adds a purely educational dimension (enlightenment) to the process and
admits that the reader’s aim may be to lead a more satisfying as well as a more
effective life. In effect, this expanded definition recognizes the self-help book’s
function as an educational and perhaps inspirational resource rather than
as simply a remedy, even when the author may have intended the book to
serve as a cure.
This quandary about the function and content of self-help books some-
times shows up symbolically on the back or front cover of a work where the
publisher has tried to indicate the category to which the book belongs. For
example, Stephen Covey’s best-seller The Seven Habits of Highly Effective
People bears the following identifiers at the top of the back cover: Self-Help/
Psychology/Inspirational. His more recent Principle-Centered Leadership
(1990) is identified as Business/Self-Help/Inspiration. Stephen and Ondrea
Levine’s book Embracing the Beloved: Relationship as a Path to Awakening
(1995) is classified as Spirituality/Self-Help, while Paula Payne Hardin’s What
Are You Doing with the Rest of Your Life? Choices in Midlife (1992) is marked
with the label Personal Growth/Self-Help. Both Marsha Sinetar’s Develop-
ing a 21st-Century Mind (1991) and Neil Fiore’s Now Habit (1989) are classified
as both Self-Help and Business books, but in Sinetar’s case the business des-
ignation comes first while in Fiore’s case “Self-Help” is listed first. Mark
Goulston and Philip Goldberg’s Get Out of Your Own Way (1995) is marked
as both Self-Help and Psychology. Louis Janda’s Psychologist’s Book of Self-
Tests (1996) is identified simply as Self-Help.
At play here is a certain uneasiness with acknowledging not amateurish
but rather popular and applied research in some of the standard academic
disciplines: business, psychology, religion, philosophy, education, medicine,
sociology and anthropology, even physics, biology, and environmental stud-
ies. It is one thing to write informatively about one’s discipline for a lay au-
dience and yet another thing to write with the clear intention of offering
guidance to each individual reader—to suggest ways that one’s discipline or
research might directly affect a reader’s personal philosophy and day-to-day
behavior in the world. The sermons of preachers and the lectures of teach-
ers are probably the closest analogy to this kind of writing in contemporary
American culture—perhaps the homilies of priests, rabbis, and preachers
02.Ch02.35-55/Dolby 38 2/7/05, 10:17 AM

more clearly than the lessons of teachers. Their intention is to enlighten and
persuade, and their content is, at least to some extent, the theology and dis-
cipline of their training.
We may expect preachers to offer homilies, but we typically expect schol-
ars in a given discipline to write books that further that discipline, maybe
even making that discipline more accessible to lay readers, but not to write
books that guide readers toward more effective and satisfying lives—not to
write self-help books. Authors who choose to write self-help books address
not simply a different audience but also a different task than those associ-
ated with scholarly writing. Even a book like Paul Davies’s God and the New
Physics is written in response to the author’s observation that “ordinary
people” are “searching for a deeper meaning behind their lives” (1983, vii).
The content of self-help books is both varied and consistent. It draws upon
a variety of disciplines, yet it consistently emerges in the writing as the stuff
of self-improvement—new insights, reconsidered conventions and ideas,
more meaningful answers to questions about the world and the cosmos,
suggestions on ways to change an attitude or behavior that may bring greater
satisfaction to the reader’s life. The basic content of self-help books is prac-
tical knowledge and insights that can be used for self-improvement.
The style of self-help books is decidedly informal in comparison to the
formal, academic style of scholarly writing. Typically there are few if any
footnotes or endnotes and often no bibliography. The style is also rhetorical
rather than artistic, although some books may use language in ways that are
appealing as well as persuasive. Authors often use second person in address-
ing their readers, and nearly all use a plural “we” to make themselves more
an approachable part of the reader’s circle of acquaintances. Self-help books
frequently make use of trendy or colloquial language, sometimes even pur-
posefully using popular or truly vulgar (in both senses) terms. For example,
in Breaking Free: A Prescription for Personal and Organizational Change, David
M. Noer uses the term “BSer” to identify people who respond to organiza-
tional situations with aggressive but shallow solutions. He says of his choice
of usage: “We fervently sought a more scientific (if not more politically cor-
rect) term for this type but—based on input from colleagues, clients, and
personal experience—could not discover a more descriptive label. We mean
BSer in its common colloquial and fetid sense” (1997, 67).
Closely related to the style of self-help books is the form, or rather the
variety of forms, of self-help books. At a deep level, all self-help books take
the form (or more accurately, the structure) of the problem/solution puz-
zle: some troublesome or faulty belief or practice is a part of culture, and the
author exposes this error in some effective way; the author then presents a
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40 self-help books
solution to the problem and tries to persuade readers to accept it, or better
yet to try using the proposed solution in their lives. Beyond this basic struc-
ture, however, there are a number of specific subgenres or forms that authors
have chosen to use in taking on their literary task.
Out of the more than three hundred self-helps books I have read and the
countless more I have browsed at bookstores, I have identified three general
literary forms that are typically used by contemporary authors: the parable,
the essay, and the manual or how-to book. We might expect to see most self-
help books falling into the last category, but in fact relatively few do. Those
that do tend to be in the field of business or time management, for example,
Alan Lakein’s How to Get Control of Your Time and Your Life (1973) or, more
recently, Perry M. Smith’s Rules and Tools for Leaders (1998). Actually, Smith’s
book, which is quite good, takes the form of the manual only in the substan-
tial appendix A, which comprises a “Checklist and Guidelines for the Busy
Leader.” The main part of the book takes the essay form with divisions in
the discussion falling into parts dictated by each of the “rules” included in
the checklist. In a similar vein, Arthur L. Williams Jr.’s All You Can Do Is All
You Can Do but All You Can Do Is Enough! (1988) offers a number of specific
rules and formulas, as does Walter Anderson’s Confidence Course: Seven Steps
to Self-Fulfillment (1997), but in both books, each section or rule is bolstered
by a short essay explaining why that rule makes sense.
Other books that take the how-to form are typically in the field of medi-
cine or diet (Joan Borysenko’s Minding the Body, Mending the Mind [1987];
Andrew Weil’s Spontaneous Healing [1995]), child rearing (Benjamin Spock’s
Baby and Child Care [1946], since reprinted and revised many times), per-
sonal relationships (David J. Lieberman’s Never Be Lied to Again [1998]), the
more general “personal growth” (Ken Keyes Jr.’s Handbook to Higher Con-
sciousness [1975] and How to Enjoy Your Life in Spite of It All [1980]), or, as we
might expect, sexuality (Lonnie Barbach’s For Each Other: Sharing Sexual
Intimacy [1983]). Some books of popular psychology adopt the how-to form
but expand each “step” in the how-to process into a fuller essay that serves
to persuade rather than simply to instruct. For example, Sidney B. Simon’s
Getting Unstuck (1988) offers a number of specific strategies for overcoming
eight “roadblocks” he outlines in the book. Simon, as one of the authors of
the influential educational handbook on Values Clarification (1972), is quick
to offer in Getting Unstuck exercises that he hopes will “teach” his readers the
strategies he is presenting. This modified how-to book is actually more like
a workbook, and there are a number of self-help books that borrow this class-
room tool as part of their form and argument.
Like teachers who more often use the workbook form, self-help authors
02.Ch02.35-55/Dolby 40 2/7/05, 10:17 AM

who incorporate exercises or workbook pages into their books are assum-
ing a high level of instructive control even while they allow significant free-
dom in how the reader completes the exercises. The objective of such authors
(for example, Julia Cameron in The Artist’s Way: A Spiritual Path to Higher
Creativity [1992] or Sam Keen and Anne Valley-Fox in Your Mythic Journey
[1989]) is to guide readers through a set of learning strategies that can be
applied in a variety of contexts. The reality of what exactly must be learned
is quite different in such workbook-based books than it is in a typical how-
to book. In fact, self-help books that use exercise and workbook pages are
closer in many ways to the first category mentioned above—the parable. The
notable difference is that the author of a parable presents a story without
commentary (beyond that internal in the instructive story itself), while the
author of a workbook-based book offers commentary on sample illustrations
but leaves the choice of illustrations the reader creates up to the reader.
A popular example of the parable form of self-help book is James Redfield’s
Celestine Prophecy, as well as his sequels, The Tenth Insight: Holding the Vision
(1996) and The Secret of Shambhala: In Search of the Eleventh Insight (1999).
The unnamed narrator in The Celestine Prophecy tells of his adventures in Peru
where he goes to discover more about an ancient manuscript. Nine impor-
tant insights translated from that manuscript emerge as he moves about the
country; all the while, he is pursued by the military and aided by various sym-
pathizers who know about the manuscript. Redfield’s book speaks to both
spiritual and psychological concerns, but his mode of presentation is fictional.
The form is similar to the novel, with a variety of characters introduced and
at least minimally developed. However, within the narrative a clear catalog of
lessons to be learned is apparent; in fact, the nine “insights” are the steps in
the how-to formula that Redfield hopes to teach. Besides the two sequels,
which are also parables, Redfield offers (with coauthor Carol Adrienne) a
companion piece, The Celestine Prophecy: An Experiential Guide (1995). The
Experiential Guide is a workbook intended for study groups or individual use.
In effect, Redfield initially simply allowed the parable itself to influence readers
as all literature does—through the appreciation and application the readers
themselves were able to envision after reading the book. However, in the Ex-
periential Guide, he makes those connections more explicit; he invites the
readers to bring their own experiences and thoughts into play as each insight
is discussed. Redfield has adopted a pedagogical perspective that assumes
personal applications of a lesson are better than abstract ones, even better than
concrete but fictional ones.
Redfield’s use of a fictional narrative as the primary form for his self-help
book is unusual but not unique. Other writers who have chosen the parable
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42 self-help books
form include Wayne Dyer (Gifts from Eykis [1983]) and Dan Millman (Way
of the Peaceful Warrior [2000]; The Laws of the Spirit [1995]), who presents
sound bites of advice or “laws” through framing encounters with an old,
eccentric gas-station attendant or a “mountain sage.” Psychologist Carl Rog-
ers calls Spencer Johnson’s One Minute for Myself a “modern fable.” Its char-
acters—an unnamed businessman, Uncle, and Auntie—present the self-help
content through their dialogue and embedded stories. Similarly, Richard C.
Whiteley gives his recent book The Corporate Shaman the subtitle A Business
Fable for the Modern Age (2002). I have chosen to use the term “parable” for
these instructive narratives because parables are most often presented with-
out further explanation; the teller allows the listener’s own perceptiveness to
determine how effective the parable is.
The most famous raconteur of parables is, of course, Jesus, who adopted
the traditional use of such stories from his own Jewish background. Jesus tells
his disciples why he chooses to speak in parables: “This is why I speak to them
in parables, because seeing they do not see, and hearing they do not hear, nor
do they understand” (Matthew 13:13 RSV). And later he says to his disciples,
“But blessed are your eyes, for they see, and your ears, for they hear.” It is
almost as though Jesus was aware that, for people not already tuned into his
message, his stories needed the informed explication that would occupy
preachers for the next two thousand years and more. Some texts are meant
to be like poetry—rich with a myriad of possible meanings. Parables are
constrained somewhat because they are intended to be instructive rather than
simply expressive, but they do through their narrative form allow for more
than one interpretation.
A more common form for the self-help book than either the parable or
the how-to book is the less blatantly instructive essay form. Traditionally, an
essay is a short piece written on a single topic but offered with no presump-
tion of thoroughness or scientific rigor. An essay is not a treatise or disserta-
tion; it is not a monograph or even a “study.” All of these alternative terms
are used in discussing works that are intended to treat a subject in an exhaus-
tive manner. An essay can be quite serious, but it need not presume to present
the reader with anything like a complete report on the topic, not even a com-
plete report on the author’s own thinking on the subject. This is why self-
help book authors can easily write three or four bestsellers on much the same
topic; the form is open-ended and friendly to the practice of recirculation,
expansion, revision, or even simply restating in a new way. Each book is its
own performance without being the definitive statement from the author.
Julia Cameron’s Artist’s Way is an example of a self-help book that uses
the essay form in a workbook subtype. Here, exercises, fill-in charts, journal
02.Ch02.35-55/Dolby 42 2/7/05, 10:17 AM

assignments, and check-in quizzes are inserted in the ongoing series of es-
says on such topics as the sense of integrity, the sense of abundance, or the
sense of identity. The author does offer her own commentary on the topics
selected, but she requires the reader to create and provide the “texts” that
illustrate the points she makes. A closely related subtype is the story collec-
tion subtype. Here, the self-help book offers a number of short narratives from
various sources and follows each with some commentary that collectively
supports the book’s educational objective. Jack Canfield and Mark Victor
Hansen’s immensely popular Chicken Soup for the Soul is this kind of book,
as are their many other Chicken Soup books.
The textual interpretation subtype is a third variation of the essay form. Here,
the author selects one text to serve as a basis for discussion throughout the
entire book. One example that I, as a folklorist, found particularly interest-
ing is Marsha Sinetar’s Living Happily Ever After: Creating Trust, Luck, and Joy
(1990). In this book, the author uses the Brothers Grimm version of the fairy
tale “Hansel and Gretel” as the textual basis for her discussion of the themes
of trust, luck, and joy. At the beginning of each chapter, she relates another
part of the story and then proceeds to show how the strategies adopted by
Hansel and Gretel can be useful to readers in their own daily lives. Other ex-
amples of the textual interpretation form include Robert Bly’s Iron John (1990)
or Benjamin Hoff’s Tao of Pooh (1983) as well as Marianne Parady’s interpre-
tation of the works of Ralph Waldo Emerson (Seven Secrets for Successful Liv-
ing). Perhaps even Wess Roberts and Bill Ross’s Make It So: Leadership Les-
sons from Star Trek, The Next Generation (1995) could be included here, along
with the many more group-specific interpretations and applications of reli-
gious texts.
A special category recently adopted with vigor and offering in some ways
a peculiar spin on the interpretation of a religious text is a fourth category I
will call the dialogue subtype. The startlingly successful example of this form
is the Conversations with God series of books (1995, 1998a, 1998b) by Neale
Donald Walsch, as well as two additional “conversations” called Friendship
with God (1999) and Communion with God (2000). He subtitles each of these
books An Uncommon Dialogue, and he presents each book in the form of a
conversation between two individuals (one of whom is God, the other the
author). Each speaker has his own font; it is quite clear who is speaking when.
Walsch claims that he is writing God’s part of the conversation through the
process of dictation, a claim very similar to one made some years ago by Jane
Roberts when she dictated the Seth books. A less belief-challenging example
of the dialogue form is a book by Matthew Fox and Rupert Sheldrake called
Natural Grace (1996). Here again, each “speaker” has his own font. The form
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44 self-help books
itself is clearly in the tradition of the famous dialogues offered by Plato as a

means of presenting the philosophy of his teacher Socrates, as well as his own.
Perhaps the form best-suited to the aims of the self-help book tradition is
the meditation subtype. Here, the author brings together a series of his or her
own short essays loosely grouped by subject matter and presents them as a
sequence of personal reflections. The hope, of course, is that the reader will
find some or all of the meditations helpful and enlightening. As a rule of
thumb, I would suggest that whenever the book includes more than a dozen
chapters, it very likely falls into the category of the meditation subtype.
One enormously successful book of this subtype is Richard Carlson’s Don’t
Sweat the Small Stuff . . . and It’s All Small Stuff (1997). Carlson’s book has one
hundred short chapters (usually only two or three pages long). In fact, he stays
with that formula of one hundred chapters in his many other Don’t Sweat
books. Others authors who use this form include Jon Kabat-Zinn (Wherever
You Go, There You Are), Buddhist monk Jack Kornfield (A Path with Heart: A
Guide through the Perils and Promises of Spiritual Life [1993]), and Catholic
priest Anthony de Mello (Awareness; The Way to Love [1991]). Occasionally,
even some scientists or physicians present their ideas in this meditation for-
mat; for example, science writer Richard Morris calls one of his books Cos-
mic Questions: Galactic Halos, Cold Dark Matter, and the End of Time (1993)
and groups together a number of short essays, each of which speaks to some
aspect of several large issues, such as “Why do we exist?” or “Knowing the
mind of God.” Similarly, Herbert Benson offers in his book Timeless Heal-
ing: The Power and Biology of Belief (with Marg Stark, 1996) a number of short
essays grouped by topic in which he reflects on issues related to mind/body
matters now very much a part of contemporary medicine. The form is an ideal
one for expressing thoughts in brief, memorable bites. The power of the book
is in grouping them together in a way that again loosely directs the reader’s
attention toward an overall area of enlightenment or change in perspective
and behavior.
The last two subtypes of the essay form are not always easily distinguished
from one another. I call them the expanded essay subtype and the academic study
subtype. Again, these are formal categories within the genre of the self-help
book, and perhaps stylistic categories within the essay form itself. I will have
to admit that any hope of keeping a consistency—even a foolish consistency—
in the designation of these categories is futile. There is an inevitable messiness
about them. As Martin Gardner says in his preface to Great Essays in Science,
“As a literary form the essay has always had irresponsible boundaries” (1994,
xiv). Still, I think there is a shared though loose understanding of what an es-
02.Ch02.35-55/Dolby 44 2/7/05, 10:17 AM

say is. John Gross, in the introduction to his anthology The Oxford Book of
Essays, comments on the “central tradition of essay-writing” influenced so
profoundly by the sixteenth-century French writer Michel de Montaigne: “No
matter how large its subject, the distinguishing marks of an essay by Montaigne
are intimacy and informality” (1991, ix). A larger work (book-length) that ex-
hibits these hallmarks of intimacy and informality along with a focus on a single
topic might well be seen as simply an expanded essay.
Most self-help books, I would argue, are of the expanded essay subtype.
One of my favorites is the short (104 pages) book by Ivan Hoffman called The
Tao of Love (1993). Actually, the last 20 pages of the book offer several how-
to suggestions, so the main “essay” is actually about 75 pages long. What
Hoffman does in this expanded essay is move in an intimate and informal
way through the development of his thesis, offering illustrations from his own
life and bringing in appropriate quotes and images from other authors in an
effort to support the insights he articulates. His thesis is that we need to learn
how to love and that learning to trust is the essential first step in learning to
love. Though the discussion is very informal and even in such a short work
never rushed, all is directed toward leading the reader (perhaps even seduc-
ing the reader) into an acceptance of this thesis.
Rhetoric is the winning card in a good essay. The essay form invites the
writer to pull out all the stops; it is nonfiction’s poetry, the writer’s chance
to use language and effective example to intrigue, stimulate, and ultimately
persuade the reader. Little wonder, then, that many of the most successful self-
help books adopting the expanded essay form are often metaphorical even
in their titles: James A. Kitchens’s Talking to Ducks (1994); Wayne Dyer’s Your
Erroneous Zones or The Sky’s the Limit (1980) or Real Magic (1992); Sam Keen’s
Fire in the Belly (1991); Claudia Bepko and Jo-Ann Krestan’s Too Good for Her
Own Good (1990); Harriet Goldhor Lerner’s Dance of Anger (1985) or The
Dance of Deception (1993); Lillian B. Rubin’s Intimate Strangers (1983); Gary
Zukav’s Dancing Wu Li Masters (1979) or The Seat of the Soul (1999); Robert
H. Hopcke’s There Are No Accidents (1997); Wayne Muller’s Legacy of the Heart
(1992); even Scott Peck’s Road Less Traveled or John Gray’s runaway bestseller
Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus (1992). The objective in all such
expanded essays is to sell the thesis, to persuade readers toward a new, en-
lightened perspective, and perhaps as well to convince them to try new be-
haviors that just might lead to a happier life.
But not all writers of self-help books are eager to take on the role of non-
fiction’s poets. Some prefer the more sober form of the academic study sub-
type, the form closest to the scholarly genres they may be used to. The style,
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46 self-help books
content, and function of the academic study subtype, nevertheless, are dif-
ferent from those associated with model academic studies written by schol-
ars with the aim of addressing some thorny and unresolved issue in their
discipline. It is a fact, however, that the academic study subtype of the self-
help book is usually written by a Ph.D. who has put on his or her popular
writer hat or teamed up with a second writer or editor whose writing style is
more suited to a lay audience. The distinctive feature of the academic study
subtype is the book’s emphasis on information over instruction. While it is
clear that the author has presented the material in such a way that the read-
er will find it easy to “use” it—that is, the information is more accessible than
would be a more scholarly presentation—still, the author has not assumed
a more direct instructive role. The book is intended to enlighten, and the
author seems motivated by a desire to help people improve their understand-
ing of life or the cosmos, but it is left up to the reader to determine how that
new enlightenment might be applied in daily life—the opposite extreme of
the how-to book.
One author who uses the academic study subtype very effectively is Mi-
haly Csikszentmihalyi, a productive scholar with hundreds of publications
in traditional academic journals and university presses. However, his first
really popular publication with a trade book press (Harper and Row) was
Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience (1990). In his preface to that book,
he articulates a position that I believe is held either consciously or implicitly
by most writers who use the academic study form:
This book summarizes, for a general audience, decades of research on the posi-
tive aspects of human experience—joy, creativity, the process of total involvement
with life I call flow. To take this step is somewhat dangerous, because as soon as
one strays from the stylized constraints of academic prose, it is easy to become
careless or overly enthusiastic about such a topic. What follows, however, is not a
popular book that gives insider tips about how to be happy. . . . There is no prom-
ise of easy short-cuts in these pages. But for readers who care about such things,
there should be enough information to make possible the transition from theo-
ry to practice. (xi)
Csikszentmihalyi goes on to explain that he has tried to make the book “user-
friendly,” having avoided “footnotes, references, and other tools scholars
usually employ in their technical writing” but including easily accessible
endnotes and a substantial bibliography. He examines the topic of his book
through the process of summarizing past research and integrating its lessons
into his own thesis. He is eager to bring enlightenment to his readers, but he
leaves the “transition from theory to practice” up to them.
02.Ch02.35-55/Dolby 46 2/7/05, 10:17 AM

Other examples of the academic study subtype include such books as Gail
Sheehy’s bestselling Passages: Predictable Crises of Adult Life (1974), Ellen J.
Langer’s Mindfulness (1989), Robert L. Van de Castle’s Our Dreaming Mind
(1994), David Darling’s Soul Search: A Scientist Explores the Afterlife (1995),
and Paul Brockelman’s Cosmology and Creation: The Spiritual Significance of
Contemporary Cosmology (1999). Some authors, such as Peter Senge (The Fifth
Discipline) and Daniel Goleman (Emotional Intelligence [1995]), follow their
popular research-based books with a related workbook or guide that makes
suggestions on how to apply the material presented in their earlier books
(Peter Senge, Art Kleiner, Charlotte Roberts, Richard B. Ross, and Bryan J.
Smith, The Fifth Discipline Fieldbook [1994], and Daniel Goleman, Working
with Emotional Intelligence [1998]).
The academic study subtype of the self-help book is the one most obvi-
ously in the tradition of self-improvement established early on in American
culture through the Chautauqua movement and other such forums for in-
volved public intellectuals. Lectures in that context were expected to be in-
formative, not necessarily instructive. Similarly, some self-help books are
offered in something very much like that traditional academic study form.
The author has confidence in the effectiveness of the academic study form
and chooses to write in a form as close to it as possible. Yet in choosing to
address a popular audience, the writer, in a way, sets aside for the moment
full participation in the culture of his or her discipline and instead moves into
another culture group—that of self-help book writers—and brings along a
form that can serve there as well. Still, books in the self-help tradition are
distinctive by more than form alone.2
Along with content, it is the function of self-help books that sets them
apart. They are intended to be educational, and supposedly, when effective,
they will not only enlighten the reader but also transform or convert the
reader into a happier and more successful person. In terms of the actual con-
sequences of reading self-help books, there is little research available to doc-
ument how effective such books are, little proof that people do in fact change
their behavior as a result of reading self-help books. On the other hand, there
is abundant anecdotal evidence that people have become self-help “literate”
by virtue of having read many such books. They know what is supposed to
be good for them, and they have enhanced their knowledge and understand-
ing of the cosmos, relationships, and good mental, emotional, and spiritual
health. They have gained some level of enlightenment. Clearly self-help
books are successful at educating readers. But what exactly have they learned?
We shall return to this question of applied self-education briefly in chap-
ters 4 and 8.
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48 self-help books
The Writers
One latent function of self-help books is that they provide their authors with
an opportunity to bear witness to their own transformation or conversion.
This may go far in explaining why the expanded essay form is so popular
among self-help authors. The intimate, personal tone of the essay permits
the unabashed enthusiasm and sense of epiphany the writer is often required
to keep subdued in more scholarly writing. Often the sense of personal ar-
dor, even proselytizing, is apparent throughout a given book—for example,
in Anthony Robbins’s Awaken the Giant Within (1991) or Marsha Sinetar’s
Ordinary People as Monks and Mystics (1986) or Margaret J. Wheatley’s Lead-
ership and the New Science: Learning about Organization from an Orderly
Universe (1992). Such authors typically include in their books not only a “sto-
ry” about a particular incident that, like James Joyce’s epiphanies, captures
the essence of their conversion to the idea presented in the book but also a
recurring tone of earnestness and zeal that conveys the authenticity of their
emotional involvement with the topic at hand.
I shall say more about authors’ use of personal narratives in chapter 6, but
I would like to cite one example here—Wayne Dyer’s account of finding and
visiting his father’s grave. In his book You’ll See It When You Believe It (1989),
Dyer relates the story in great detail, though he refers to the incident again
in later books. In telling his story, he also comments on how the incident fits
into his own decision to write the kind of books he is now best known for.
He begins the narrative after relating how he, his mother, and his two brothers
had been abandoned years before by his father.
In 1970 I received a call from a cousin I had never met, who had heard a ru-
mor that my father had died in New Orleans. But I was in no position to in-
vestigate it. At the time I was completing my doctoral studies, moving to New
York to become an associate professor at St. John’s University, going through a
painful divorce, and “stuck in place” when it came to my writing. In the next
few years I co-authored several texts on counseling and psychotherapy. I knew
that I did not want to continue writing for strictly professional audiences, and
yet nothing else would come to me. I was stuck, personally (divorce), physical-
ly (overweight and out of shape), and spiritually (a pure pragmatist with no
thoughts about metaphysics). (4)
Dyer goes on to tie the finding of his father’s grave to his own eventual suc-
cess as a writer of self help-books:
In one pure honest moment I experienced feeling forgiveness for the man who
was my father and for the child I had been who wanted to know and love him.
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I felt a kind of peace and cleansing that was entirely new for me. Though I was
unaware of it at the time, that simple act of forgiveness was the beginning of
an entirely new level of experiencing life for me. I was on the threshold of a stage
of my life that was to encompass worlds I could not even imagine in those days.
When I went back to New York, miracles began to appear everywhere. I wrote
Your Erroneous Zones with ease. An agent arrived in my life through a series of
“strange” circumstances at exactly the right moment. . . . In the years that fol-
lowed, my writing seemed to be taking me in new directions. I went from writ-
ing about “How to” utilize specific strategies in self-understanding to “How to”
become a more assertive human being. I went from telling people how to do
something to writing about the importance of being at transcendent levels as
a human being. (7–8)
Dyer’s own “conversion” has clearly been significant in bringing him into
the society—or as Marilyn Ferguson calls it, the “conspiracy”—of self-help
book authors. Most of the successful writers in the genre are people like
Wayne Dyer—professional or academic individuals who experience their
own enlightenment as a motivation, a force compelling them to educate oth-
ers about the good effects their new understanding can produce if given a
chance. And they are keenly aware that writing in the stuffy, though rigor-
ous and academically sound, style of the scientist is no way to bring new
converts into the fold. They take on the mantle of the self-help writer with
all the earnest goodwill of a newly enlightened prophet.
Who are these writers? Some have started to attain a kind of cultural cur-
rency similar to that awarded literary figures or public intellectuals in the last
century. When a book has had a significant impact, the author’s name is re-
membered the next time a reader visits the bookstore, and if a new book by
that same author is on the shelf (or the Internet list), it too will go into the
shopping cart. Many authors have several books in print. Others become
household names with the publication of only one very influential book. Some
of these most successful authors are Joan Borysenko, John Bradshaw, Nathaniel
Branden, Joyce Brothers, David Burns, Leo Buscaglia, Jack Canfield, Rachel
Carson, Deepak Chopra, Norman Cousins, Stephen Covey, Mihaly Csikszent-
mihalyi, Ram Dass, Barbara DeAngelis, Larry Dossey, Wayne Dyer, Robert
Fulghum, Daniel Goleman, John Gray, Gerald G. Jampolsky, Susan Jeffers,
Spencer Johnson, Jon Kabat-Zinn, Sam Keen, Ken Keyes Jr., Jack Kornfield,
Peter Kramer, Harold Kushner, Alan Lakein, Harriet Goldhor Lerner, Phil
McGraw, Thomas Moore, Scott Peck, Tom Peters, James Redfield, Anthony
Robbins, Lillian Rubin, Theodore Rubin, Robert Schuller, Martin Seligman,
Peter Senge, Gail Sheehy, Barbara Sher, Bernie Siegel, Marsha Sinetar, Debo-
rah Tannen, Neale Donald Walsch, Marianne Williamson, and Gary Zukav.
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50 self-help books
Most of these are living authors; some are perhaps busy even now writing
new books in the genre. And every month new writers offer their bid at sell-
ing wisdom to an eager public. I hesitate to suggest a profile for these writ-
ers. They are varied in background and personality, and yet there are some
shared characteristics among them. They tend to be well educated. Though
there are quite a few women among the authors of self-help books, there are
more male than female authors. Most are white—not necessarily Anglo-
Saxon, but white (though the number of African American writers is grow-
ing); most are heterosexual and married, though often it is clear that they are
in a second or third marriage; and almost all of them have found ways to pro-
mote their ideas through other media, lecture tours, workshops, and often
even entire institutions established to teach their insights. Many of them are
quite wealthy as a result of their writing.
These writers often represent a kind of popularizer only grudgingly toler-
ated within their academic disciplines. Some, like Wayne Dyer, can claim the
privilege of writing for a popular audience by virtue of having already paid
their dues to their discipline. Some, like Deborah Tannen, continue to write
both scholarly and popular works, satisfying both “communities” of which
they are a part. But in every discipline there is at least one ancestor, one figure
of some stature, who broke away from the confines of scholarly writing and
presented the discipline in a way that was both interesting and useful to readers
outside the field. Earliest in American tradition was probably Benjamin Frank-
lin. His autobiography and many essays and aphorisms continue to influence
thinking in the business community (see, for example, Peter Baida’s Poor
Richard’s Legacy: American Business Values from Benjamin Franklin to Michael
Milken [1990]). I have already mentioned the importance of early essayists
such as Emerson and Thoreau, and certainly Sigmund Freud, Carl Jung, and
William James must be counted among the ancestors. But writers from the
earlier part of the twentieth century are the more likely candidates for the title
of ancestor, or perhaps literary mentor, people such as Abraham Maslow in
psychology, Bertrand Russell in philosophy, C. S. Lewis in religion, John Dewey
in education, Ruth Benedict in anthropology, Douglas McGregor in business,
or Thomas Merton on the ascetic life. The more general category of “personal
growth” as a subject has its outstanding mentors as well: Dale Carnegie, Nor-
man Vincent Peale, and Maxwell Maltz, author of one of the earliest popular
pocket-size paperbacks, Psycho-Cybernetics (1960).
These writers—both those who wrote the classics in self-help literature and
the writers living and writing today—drew upon a tradition of scholarship
and popular literature and upon their own experience. Often it has been the
experience of seeing the effects of their educational or therapeutic activities
02.Ch02.35-55/Dolby 50 2/7/05, 10:17 AM

in the lives of real people that has compelled these authors to write their first
self-help books. Susan Jeffers comments in a later book on why she wrote her
first self-help book, Feel the Fear and Do It Anyway. She recounts a story of
how she decided quite spontaneously to offer a course at the New School for
Social Research:
Teaching that course was a turning point in my life. My experience was so pos-
itive and felt so right that I decided to leave my job of ten years to become a teach-
er and a writer of self-help books. It is significant that the name of that first class
I taught was Feel the Fear and Do It Anyway! I often wonder if I had not listened
to my intuition that fateful day, if the book of the same name or any of my oth-
er books (including this one) would ever have been written! (1996, 84)
Clearly, for writers such as Susan Jeffers or Wayne Dyer, the decision to
write a book that serves a different function, that takes them into a different
community of writers, and that allows them to make what they see as a need-
ed contribution is a decision made almost as a reluctant surprise, even to
themselves. It is this quality that gives their decision the flavor of a conver-
sion experience. And it is this experience of being converted or born into a
new community of practitioners that comes through in the related practice
of metacommentary both in the books themselves and more strikingly on
the front and back covers of these popular paperbacks.
Metacommentary
In the middle of the twentieth century, there emerged in many disciplines
an interest in the “meta-” dimension of subjects of research—metalanguage,
metacommunications, metanarrative, metafiction, even metafolklore (see
Dundes, 1966). “Metacommentary” would be commentary about commen-
tary. In the case of self-help books, metacommentary has been an essential
element in promoting, authenticating, and maintaining the practice of writ-
ing self-help literature. The most visible instance of metacommentary occurs
on the front and back covers of self-help books, and often inside on the first
few pages of front matter as well. Here we find quotes praising the current
or past books of the jacketed book’s author along with an identification of
the author of each quote via the title of one or more of his or her own self-
help books. It is assumed that the potential buyer of the book will recognize
some or all of the names and books of writers offering brief commentary
through these quotes. It is an important means of promoting the book as well
as of authenticating the author as a writer known and appreciated by other
successful self-help book authors.
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52 self-help books
I was cheered by one particularly apt example of metacommentary in the

introduction to Richard Carlson’s Don’t Sweat the Small Stuff . . . and It’s All
Small Stuff. Carlson writes:
I’d like to share a personal story that touched my heart and reinforced an
important lesson—a story that demonstrates the essential message of this book.
As you will see, the events of this story planted the seed for the title of the book
you are about to read.
About a year ago a foreign publisher contacted me and requested that I at-
tempt to get an endorsement from best-selling author Dr. Wayne Dyer for a
foreign edition of my book You Can Feel Good Again. I told them that while Dr.
Dyer had given me an endorsement for an earlier book, I had no idea whether
he would consider doing so again. I told them, however, that I would try.
Carlson then relates how he tried to reach author Wayne Dyer but failed to
get an answer. He told the publisher to leave the endorsement off, but it was
put on the cover anyway. Upset, he called his agent and had the books pulled.
He continues:
In the meantime I decided to write Dr. Dyer an apology, explaining the situation
and all that was being done to rectify the problem. After a few weeks of wonder-
ing about what his response might be, I received a letter in the mail that said the
following: “Richard. There are two rules for living in harmony. #1) Don’t sweat
the small stuff and #2) It’s all small stuff. Let the quote stand. Love, Wayne.”
That was it! No lectures, no threats. No hard feelings and no confrontation.
Despite the obvious unethical use of his very famous name, he responded with
grace and humility. (1997, 2–4)
This is not to suggest that the writers of self-help books do not have egos.
Still, the overwhelming message conveyed through most of the books is that
writers in the field of personal growth and self-improvement constitute a
supportive community, one that rejoices in each new addition to the collec-
tive insights that draw them together. Metacommentary in the books them-
selves often reinforces this message. For example, Susan Jeffers, in End the
Struggle and Dance with Life, tells the following story:
A while ago, I gave a talk at an all-day symposium. Three other speakers were
on the schedule, all of whom were household names in the self-help field. As I
was getting ready to walk on the stage to face three-thousand people sitting in
the audience, my adrenaline was flowing big time! My husband, Mark, kissed
me on the cheek and whispered in my ear, “You’ll be the best.”
In the past I had loved hearing that, I needed to hear that! But this time, some-
thing didn’t feel right about it. I suddenly became aware of the negative con-
02.Ch02.35-55/Dolby 52 2/7/05, 10:17 AM

sequences of trying to be “the best.” It created tension; it created alienation from
the other speakers; and it took me off my Higher-Self purpose, which was to
help others. As this Aha! hit me, I whispered in Mark’s ear, “Thanks for the
loving support, but next time just say, ‘You’ll be good enough.’” And with that
letting go of my need to be the best, I walked confidently onto the stage, know-
ing that my only purpose was to put love into this world, not to compete with
other people who are trying to put their love into the world as well. (1996, 36–37)
Often authors refer to one another’s work in their own books, or, more
often, they offer the reader a quote from a given author without in fact iden-
tifying the source beyond simply listing the author’s name. Another kind of
metacommentary that highlights the sense of community among self-help
book writers is the growing number of anthologies or edited interviews that
bring together some of the better-known individuals in the field of personal
growth and spirituality. Handbook for the Soul, edited by Richard Carlson and
Benjamin Shield (1995), for example, includes short essays by Lynn Andrews,
Angeles Arrien, Sydney Banks, Melody Beattie, Jean Shinoda Bolen, Joan
Borysenko, Nathaniel Branden, Jack Canfield, Richard Carlson, Stephen Cov-
ey, Wayne Dyer, Betty Eadie, Matthew Fox, Robert Fulghum, John Gray, Ger-
ald G. Jampolsky, Jon Kabat-Zinn, Elizabeth Kubler-Ross, Harold Kushner,
Linda Leonard, Stephen Levine, Thomas Moore, Ram Dass, Anne Wilson
Schaef, Benjamin Shield, Bernie Siegel, Brian Weiss, Marianne Williamson,
and Marion Woodman. All are writers whose books (as well as lectures and
workshops) have brought them a certain celebrity status and have given them
a ticket of admission into the club of self-help writers.
A few journalists have taken on the task of interviewing and writing about
some of these popular authors. William Elliott, in his book Tying Rocks to
Clouds: Meetings and Conversations with Wise and Spiritual People (1995),
interviewed many of the people Carlson and Shield included in their anthol-
ogy (more than twenty in all). And Tony Schwartz, in What Really Matters:
Searching for Wisdom in America (1995), interviewed and researched the work
of many of the individuals well known as wisdom writers or wisdom seek-
ers. Though journalistic in tone and purpose, both books point to an emerg-
ing intellectual history of this often maligned and trivialized domain of pop-
ular discourse. And such historiography is the first necessity for identifying
a field of study as having come into its own. It is the quintessential metacom-
mentary.
All is not as rosy as it may seem, however, as there has long been an abid-
ing disparagement of self-help books, whether subtle or not so subtle, even
by popular writers themselves. Often there seems to be an effort on the part
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54 self-help books
of some writers to claim a more “scientific” or rigorous methodology than

that other writers have used. Daniel Goleman, in the introduction to his
immensely popular Emotional Intelligence, for example, says:
I have had to wait until now [1995] before the scientific harvest was full
enough to write this book. These insights are so late in coming largely because
the place of feeling in mental life has been surprisingly slighted by research over
the years, leaving the emotions a largely unexplored continent for scientific
psychology. Into this void has rushed a welter of self-help books, well inten-
tioned advice based at best on clinical opinion but lacking much, if any, scien-
tific basis. Now science is finally able to speak with authority to these urgent
and perplexing questions of the psyche at its most irrational, to map with some
precision the human heart. (1995, xi)
Despite Thomas Kuhn having pretty much laid to rest back in 1962 the idea
that even the hard sciences would ever be “finally able to speak with author-
ity” on the various scientific enterprises, Goleman seems willing to adopt
something akin to a “more scientific than thou” attitude with regard to oth-
er writers in the popular arena.
Interestingly, to my mind, what is happening here is an inappropriate ex-
tension of the perceived need for scientific rigor associated with disciplin-
ary scholarship into an area of rhetorical performance that serves quite a
different purpose and calls for quite a different set of “rules” for competen-
cy in that performance. The “clinical opinion” and especially the case stud-
ies used as illustration in typical self-help books are persuasive for many read-
ers. However, like the authors of the Authoritative Guide to Self-Help Books,
Goleman sees only the testable curative results of applied research as wor-
thy of serious attention, even among a popular audience. His own academic
colleagues may require such evidence, but his popular audience is more likely
persuaded by the effectiveness of his choice of illustrations than by the quan-
tifiable data that supports his own conclusions.
I’ll mention one last kind of metacommentary that, I think, plays much
more effectively upon the popular appreciation for self-help books than does
Goleman’s vaguely defensive comment. Peter D. Kramer became a house-
hold name soon after the publication of his book Listening to Prozac (1993).
On the opening page of a more recent book, Kramer makes the following
comment:
I ask Lou, whom I consider my mentor, should I or should I not write a book
of advice? I have written a best-seller, and when a psychiatrist writes a best-seller,
he is urged to write a book of advice. . . . I broach the idea in a cautious way,
through raising technical concerns about books of advice. I am suspicious of
02.Ch02.35-55/Dolby 54 2/7/05, 10:17 AM

the form—the chain of illustrative vignettes, too convenient to be fact, too
predictable to be decent fiction. I have trouble imagining writing in the sec-
ond person, the way advice books are written: You have this problem, you have
that. I have more trouble yet deciding what it is I might know. (1997, 15–16)
Kramer then proceeds to offer his reader a wonderfully creative book (I would
classify it as a parable) in which his fictionalized mentor presents him with
a kind of “dry run” on writing a self-help book, a book of advice. His men-
tor asks him to “advise” an acquaintance who seeks some help with answer-
ing the question “Should I leave?”—that is, should I end an intimate rela-
tionship? His mentor tells him that the person will come to see him in two
hours. During that time, Kramer imagines who the acquaintance might be
and writes out twenty different possible scenarios. The book is excellent, and
it examines both the nature of advice itself (and by association the self-help
book tradition) and the varying kinds of response to the question that make
sense in light of each hypothetical situation and current psychological wis-
dom. Kramer’s book playfully but effectively raises a serious question about
whether academics—or anyone else—should take up this practice of writ-
ing self-help books.
In the next chapter, we shall look in earnest at some of the critiques that
have been aimed, either directly or indirectly, at the self-help movement.
02.Ch02.35-55/Dolby 55 2/7/05, 10:17 AM

3. The Critics, the Simple Self,
and America’s Cultural Cringe
Many people seem to be annoyed and embarrassed by the fact that self-help
books are so popular in America. And it is not that such books cannot be
found elsewhere. I have spent time in Australia, England, and Norway, and
many of the same books found on the shelves in America are found in these
countries as well, along with local contributions to the growing international
library of self-help literature. I even noticed that, in Norway, some popular
titles such as John Gray’s Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus and
Neale Donald Walsch’s Conversations with God: Book 1, have been translated
into Norwegian, even though a high percentage of Norwegians read English.
All the same, people do associate the genre with America. Most of the au-
thors are American, and evidently so are most of the readers.
The Critics
One researcher who shares my respect for the self-help book is Tom Butler-
Bowdon, a writer who has selected, summarized, and reviewed examples of
what he calls “the literature of possibility.” In his 50 Self-Help Classics: 50 In-
spirational Books to Transform Your Life (2003), he offers informative, Cliffs-
Notes-style commentary on the books and brief biographies of the authors.
The book functions as would any other self-help book; the primary difference
is that the author bases each chapter of his own volume on the work of anoth-
er author and builds his own insights from that base. In general, he champi-
ons the books he has selected, and he offers little negative criticism of any of
the works or authors he reviews. Another supportive researcher who examines
self-help literature seriously is Wendy Simonds, author of the 1992 study Women
03.Ch03.56-75/Dolby 56 2/7/05, 10:18 AM

Critics, Simple Self, and Cultural Cringe 57
and Self-Help Culture: Reading between the Lines. As a sociologist, Simonds is

interested in the role such books play in the lives of women who read them.
She offers a good starting point for ethnographic work among readers.
Surprisingly, however, there have not been many genuine critiques of the
self-help literature. It seems rather to be a matter of damning by neglect, or
occasionally by parody and sarcasm, but rarely even by faint praise, at least
among scholars—the people who usually review books of nonfiction. And
yet, it is good to remember Steven Starker’s comment in his review of the
genre, Oracle at the Supermarket:
It is too prevalent and powerful a phenomenon to overlook, despite belonging
to “pop” culture. Inasmuch as self-help books are dispensing advice to millions
on matters physical, psychological, and spiritual, they cannot responsibly be ig-
nored by social scientists and health care practitioners. Questions regarding their
relative merits and potential dangers deserve careful consideration. (1989, 10)
Wendy Kaminer was one of the first to take up Starker’s challenge with the
publication of her book I’m Dysfunctional, You’re Dysfunctional in 1992. Tom
Tiede’s more recent Self-Help Nation and a few parodies, such as Herman
Minor IV’s Seven Habits of Highly Ineffective People (1994) or comedians Ben
Stiller and Janeane Garofalo’s Feel This Book (1999), suggest that the genre is
hardly worth taking seriously. All seem to agree that the popularity of such
books reflects poorly on the American people. Intellectuals in particular seem
eager to distance themselves from any personal interest in self-help literature.
As Kaminer was quick to point out: “I have read self-help books only as a
critic” (1992, 1).
Why would educated Americans be embarrassed to admit they had read
a self-help book? What is it about the genre that makes intellectuals want to
affect a stance of disdainful superiority? Why are the few critics who have
addressed the genre at all seriously so relentless in their negative evaluation
and sarcasm? Are the books really that bad? I would like to consider some of
the charges that are levied against self-help books, either directly or indirectly,
by their critics.
The few critics who have addressed the genre at some length (for exam-
ple, Kaminer, Tiede, Starker, Gary Greenberg) would barely make up a good-
sized seminar on the topic. Understandably, then, the primary points of crit-
icism themselves have not been outlined, so I will begin there. Wendy Kaminer
comes closest to having voiced most of them, though her often disparaging
tone casts a defensive pall over her critique and, I think, detracts from the
effectiveness of her commentary. Nevertheless, she has put her finger on what
I believe is the primary fear behind the scholarly disdain for the genre. She
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58 self-help books
says, “An apolitical movement [the recovery or self-help movement] that

helps shape the identities of a few million people will have political conse-
quences, and the ideology of recovery makes me question what those conse-
quences might be” (1992, 152). Like Tom Tiede, Kaminer is concerned that
Americans seem to be losing their sense of direction, their democratic ideal
of self-determination, their strength of character. In short, she is convinced
that Americans are being led astray by the same “snake-oil peddlers who are
sapping our nation’s soul” that Tiede worries about.
Kaminer does not say what she thinks the consequences of so many Amer-
icans being thus led astray might be, but she suggests that the consequences
might be political. She fears, it seems, that even the fairly well-educated, read-
ing American public will allow these self-help writers to lead them insidiously
into—what? Populism? Communism? Andrew Jackson–style democracy? At
best, she sees Americans as forfeiting their intelligence for gullibility. It ap-
pears that she is allowing her own discomfort with democratic reality to in-
fluence her thinking on the matter. American democracy has always had to
contend with the freedom of its people to read what they like, learn what they
like, and elect into office people who espouse the ideas they like. I do not share
her fear of this process (though I often find it hard to live through), but I do
recognize the need for a critique of the materials that are brought into or
reinforce an American worldview through the avenue of self-help books.
With that aim of offering a review of this important influence on and com-
ponent of an American worldview, let us examine some of the characteris-
tics of self-help literature that seem most troublesome to our hypothetical
seminar of critics.
Five points of concern or potential areas of discussion addressing the body
of self-help literature would be (1) the issue of authoritarianism versus self-
reliance; (2) a perceived poor level of writing skills and level of analysis; (3)
lack of originality; (4) the ready acceptance of a medical or “therapy” model;
and (5) a primarily female rather than male readership. Such issues are ones
that would be of interest to social and literary critics. They are not, on the other
hand, concerns typically addressed by the “customers” who offer their reviews
of specific books on-line through such media outlets as barnesandnoble.com
or amazon.com.
One worry is that self-help books reflect a growing “tendency toward au-
thoritarianism,” as the promotional blurb on the back cover of Kaminer’s
book claims. The readers of such books are seeking out experts rather than
relying on their own common sense, wisdom, and personal convictions. They
are abandoning the self-reliance Americans are supposed to be known for
and instead eagerly accepting the authority of their supposed betters. Com-
03.Ch03.56-75/Dolby 58 2/7/05, 10:18 AM

ing to this issue from a different perspective, I see the reading of self-help
books as part of a loose tradition of self-education, and the idea of educa-
tion has always involved seeking out someone more expert than the student
on a given subject. Even informally, people often go to others for advice, so I
think the claim of authoritarianism is something of a red herring. It seems
that the worry over authoritarianism has more to do with a questioning of
the quality of “expertness” of the experts rather than a fear that people will
suddenly start following in lockstep the dictates of self-help book writers. In
other words, critics of the self-help movement worry that readers will accept
as “experts” writers whom the critics regard not as “authorities” but rather
as second-rate scholars or slack researchers.
In writing this book, I am, of course, casting myself as well in the role of
critic or reviewer, and to some extent a kind of intellectual snobbishness is
required or at least expected of someone taking that role. In the rather broad
and stereotypical terms sociologist Herbert Gans uses to identify various
classes of people in the United States, I am of the “educated class” and there-
fore a proponent of “high culture,” and furthermore, I am presuming to
speak as an informed critic—a scholar, a professional—about a certain group
of objects in the culture. As Gans says, “Critics are sometimes more impor-
tant than creators, because they determine whether a given cultural item
deserves to be considered high culture” (1974, 78). I am aware of this role, and
I am aware of my own “risk” in being perceived as a traitor to my class (my
profession) by voicing sincere appreciation for self-help books as objects and
by siding with the buyers of such books as creditable individuals who do in
fact know what is good and useful and proper. Actually, I am not so much
taking a risk as hoping to use my advantage as a credentialed critic to widen
the circle of appreciation for this genre of popular nonfiction.
Gans goes on to shed some light on why the popularity of self-help books
might seem to fly in the faces of contemporary intellectuals:
High culture’s prime allegiance is to its own creator-oriented public, but it
also perceives itself as setting aesthetic standards and supplying the proper
culture for the entire society. . . . This is not to say that high culture deals with
all fundamental questions and that lower cultures ignore them. Moral issues
are constantly treated in popular entertainment fare and philosophical issues
come up as well, typically exemplified in concrete cases. Conversely, high cul-
ture does not often address itself to prosaic issues like making a living, because
such issues are not problematic for its public. (1974, 78–79)
Though Gans emphasized in his book that he saw “high” and “low” as neu-
tral terms, clearly there is a value judgment. High culture is better. In the
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60 self-help books
hegemony of intellectual exchange, those who share the taste (and distaste)
of the professional class are those whose opinions matter.
The threat inherent in popular nonfiction, then, is that this more refined
“high culture” opinion will be ignored. Instead, consumerism will determine
that self-help books are acceptable. As Steven Starker admitted, perhaps re-
luctantly, self-help books are “too pervasive and influential to be ignored.”
And as Gans reminded us, the public that has made self-help books so pop-
ular is indeed concerned with the “prosaic issues” of making a living, build-
ing satisfying personal relationships, avoiding fights, deciding how to spend
their time and effort, even learning what they truly think about health and
sickness, life and death. It is at that boundary where the prosaic slides into
the profound and meaningful that intellectuals take umbrage at this intru-
sion into their territory. How can writers who ignore the requirements of
academic rigor presume to contribute to our understanding of the human
condition? Will they not simply mislead the masses who look so easily to
authority rather than demand the proof of professional practice and academ-
ic accountability? This, to me, is the charge that Wendy Kaminer in particu-
lar makes against self-help writers.
And yet the greater concern seems to be that intellectuals themselves might
be drawn in, might offer the stamp of approval to self-help writers and their
unmonitored mentoring. As I have worked on this project, I have had a num-
ber of highly respected scholars admit to me in private that they have read
various specific self-help books and found them helpful in their personal
lives. Yet they often seem conflicted, as though they were admitting to try-
ing a folk cure rather than visiting a medical professional. This, I think, is the
source of much of the offense many intellectuals take when faced with the
self-help book phenomenon. Like nineteenth-century intellectual Sir Bur-
nett Edward Tylor, who studied folklore in order to stamp it out, contempo-
rary critics of self-help books accept as their duty the eradication of rather
than the support of “unscientific” theories and ideas. Nevertheless, they, like
“the masses,” may find themselves persuaded by some of the writing they feel
compelled to condemn. My colleague Gregory Schrempp has examined this
more general academic conflict in some detail and observes that “even in
scientific societies a relatively small part of life is comported according to the
formal scientific procedures” (1996, 192). In other words, when it comes to
how they determine to live their own lives, even intellectuals may resort to
the popular or “folk” procedures of self-help mentoring.
Authority, then, is at best a spurious issue, one that hides a worry over the
way the writers of self-help books choose to persuade their readers. The cry
of the 1960s was “Question authority,” and it seems unlikely that the read-
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ers of self-help books—many of whom are from that generation—would

abandon the habit of questioning authorities of whatever sort. Instead, what
really seems to concern critics is that readers, despite their education and
familiarity with proper research techniques, will nevertheless find persuasive
the writings of those who do not use the prescribed avenues of scholarly
writing (in which authority certainly counts for much). Critics are unhappy
not with authoritarianism but rather with the choice of people who are hon-
ored as authorities and with those authorities’ methods of persuasion. This
brings us to the second issue that goads the critics of self-help literature—
poor writing and lack of rigorous analysis.
Among self-help authors, there are individuals who give clear evidence of
being very careful writers, and there are other individuals who are easily
pegged “poor writers” by anyone used to evaluating writing. Most readers
of popular nonfiction are not necessarily accustomed to evaluating writing,
at least not consciously. As a university professor, I have the perhaps unfor-
tunate predilection to always judge other people’s writing as part of my stock-
in-trade. Critics of the self-help phenomenon have this predilection as well,
even if they claim only to be objecting to the kind or quality of ideas expressed
through self-help books. For people like me (and I assume other critics of
the genre) who value what we consider to be “good writing,” it is a disheart-
ening truth that even poor writers manage to be persuasive and to find pub-
lishers. This truth does not make me value good writing any less, but it does
suggest to me that some readers of self-help books may have other priorities
and a capacity to respond positively to other kinds of writing than the kind
I prefer.
I say “some” readers because I do think that there are many readers of self-
help books who are just as discriminating in their preferences as I am. And I
would also argue that there are many self-help writers who are quite talent-
ed and have learned to persuade as well as to inform in ways much more
appealing to a general reading audience than the typical style of most aca-
demics. On the other hand, I have often found myself wondering at the seem-
ing success of certain authors, bewildered at how they could have satisfied
any readers’ needs or expectations. It is when I face this question that I go
back to my earlier assertion that what self-help writers are about is provid-
ing the resources, curriculum, and methods for their readers’ self-education.
With that thought in mind, I would recast the issue of “poor writing and lack
of analytical rigor” as an illustration of the variety of ways of learning that
different people find effective.
In chapter 2, I discussed some aspects of style characteristic of the genre;
here, I would like to single out three features shared by many examples of
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62 self-help books
such writing that seem to “work” well for most readers, even if not for me.
My claim is not that these are features of “good writing,” at least as I under-
stand it, but rather that they are features that some writers obviously con-
sider effective teaching tools, persuasive rhetorical strategies. It should be
instructive, I might add, that these stylistic features are the very ones that
critics find most irritating about the genre: a tendency to assume a general-
ized reader (use of “you” and the inclusive royal “we”); a tendency to over-
simplify, repeat, and “dumb down” the writing; and the use of anecdotes as
though they were proofs. In other words, practices such as these, which many
critics would call aspects of “poor writing,” seem in fact to be quite effective
as rhetorical devices in self-help books.
The first and third of these features are sins that show up regularly in the
writing class I teach every summer. I know that students argue privately
among themselves that I am simply asserting my own preferences on these
matters as though they really were laws of acceptable writing. Self-help writers
would probably agree with these disgruntled students, and for the world
outside of academe, such complaints are probably justified. The second fea-
ture, however, represents my own pet peeve with the genre. As a teacher, I
recognize the value of repetition, of simplifying ideas, especially of breaking
complex ideas down into simpler ones that can be grasped more easily. How-
ever, I also know all too well that students will feel insulted if they are spo-
ken down to, if the line between helpful repetition or simplification is crossed,
if the teacher “dumbs down” the lesson.
Why are the readers of self-help books not insulted by the oversimplified
writing so characteristic of much popular nonfiction? Actually, I suspect that
often they are insulted, or at least irritated. But unlike my university students
who often seem so ready to take personally the way I might treat them in class,
readers of self-help books seem willing to forgive their authors or, perhaps
more telling, to assume that someone else in the reading audience must need
that kind of simplification. This came home to me most clearly when I bought
and started reading Gerald G. Jampolsky’s Shortcuts to God: Finding Peace
Quickly through Practical Spirituality (2000). The title of this book alone was
enough to challenge my willingness to stay immersed in this topic. And, not
only did the title promise shortcuts to a complex and profound idea, if not a
divine being (God), but the book included cartoonlike illustrations and lots
of power-point boxes and highlighted text that severely tested my intention
to keep my own reactions to the books for this project in the background. Like
my students, I found it hard not to be personally insulted when someone
seemed to be talking down to me.
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Jampolsky, a psychiatrist, is one of those writers often cited by other self-

help writers, especially for his first book, Love Is Letting Go of Fear, published
in 1979. He has had a long career as a medical doctor, founder of a health
center, worldwide lecturer, and writer. He works with both adults and chil-
dren who are facing life-threatening illnesses. This last bit of information gave
me pause as I pondered how he could possibly imagine himself an effective
writer, how he could convince himself that a book such as Shortcuts to God
could avoid the clear likelihood of insulting his readers. I can only assume
that Jampolsky has seen this style of presentation achieve the goals he set for
it. For some readers—perhaps for those who, like many of his patients, are
facing death or debilitating disease—these rhetorical techniques are effec-
tive. And, just possibly even for some other readers who simply do not let
themselves be insulted by a writer’s choice of style and presentation, there
are still worthwhile lessons to be learned through reading Shortcuts to God.
Regarding this one, I will have to conclude that beauty (and effectiveness) is
in the eye of the beholder.
Like many other critics of the genre, then, I find it a challenge personally
to get around the poor writing I perceive in some of the self-help literature.
I expect a book to exhibit features of good writing rather than to reflect the
author’s decision to publish a workshop presentation in a written format
(which I suspect is often the case). Nevertheless, I come back to two reassur-
ing points: some writers in fact are quite good as writers and have found a
new way to use their talents in a popular medium, and even those authors I
perceive as poor writers create texts that are evidently effective for some read-
ers. But, what are we to make of the closely related question about the con-
tent of self-help books? What about the lack of originality in most of this body
of literature? What about the charge that when self-help writers are being
overly simplistic and repetitive, they are also being banal and unoriginal,
merely offering their readers platitudes they already know?
As will be even more apparent in chapters 5, 6, and 7, I am convinced that
the traditionality of much of the content of self-help books not only accounts
for their success but also serves the process of creativity that does indeed lead
to small innovations in personal thought and collective worldview. But be-
fore I argue this assertion, I will quote directly one critic, Wendy Kaminer,
who sees the situation very differently:
We should be troubled by the fact that the typical mass market self-help book,
consumed by many college-educated readers, is accessible to anyone with a
decent eighth-grade education. We should worry about the willingness of so
many to believe that the answers to existential questions can be encapsulated
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64 self-help books
in the portentous pronouncements of bumper-sticker books. Only people who
die very young learn all they really need to know in kindergarten. (1992, 7)
This last sentence is a witty reference to Robert Fulghum’s All I Really Need
to Know I Learned in Kindergarten, published in 1989. Fulghum is arguing that
essential lessons for a good life are of course simple (a child can understand
them) and traditional. He is arguing on behalf of the best parts of folk wis-
dom. Some critics of the self-help literature have no patience with this bla-
tant recycling of old truths. Even more offensive to the critics, however, are
the self-help writers who believe they are offering new insights to their readers
when in fact they are not. In either case, critics would fault self-help writers
for contributing nothing new to our popular philosophy—and yet, like most
professional philosophers, self-help writers are simply offering old wine in
new wineskins. Their contribution is in making the old truths appealing to
a new generation.
If pressed, most critics of self-help books would back off from the worry
over originality. A more telling concern is with the medical or therapy mod-
el at the base of much self-help writing. It is no surprise that many self-help
authors are psychologists or physicians, and it should be no surprise that these
writers are eager to offer cures or solutions to their readers’ problems. Crit-
ics see the ready adoption of this therapy model as an unfortunate move away
from the pervasive stoicism that characterized Americans of an earlier era.
In Self-Help Nation, Tom Tiede says: “Great numbers of Americans before
the 1960s were not fixated by what was wrong, but by what was right. They
were individualists in a common struggle. They were taught self-responsi-
bility rather than self-help” (2001, 10). Perhaps this is so, or perhaps it is only
with the rise of this body of self-help literature since the 1960s that we have
before us in print a vast archive of this aspect of the American worldview.
Certainly, the suffering, depression, marital problems, and child abuse that
are often cited in self-help books are not new phenomena; they have been
with us from colonial days, whether acknowledged or not. But the assertion
that one should stoically endure and say nothing has perhaps been aban-
doned and replaced with the self-help message that it is good to talk about
problems and try to solve them.
Self-help books would seem to be anathema to those who celebrate the
rugged individualism and manly stoicism of a John Wayne. Little wonder,
then, that a final important issue for critics of self-help literature is what
Kaminer identifies as “the feminization of popular culture” (1992, xvii). Crit-
ics envision the typical reader of self-help literature as female rather than
male. Whether this is actually true or not, we do not know. I suspect that there
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are many more men than women who read self-help books concerning life
in the corporate world, and probably more women than men who read books
on personal relationships. Some books are written specifically for women—
for example, Secrets about Men Every Woman Should Know by Barbara DeAn-
gelis (1990) or Living with the Passive-Aggressive Man by Scott Wetzler (1992).
And yet the self-help addict with whom Tom Tiede opens his book—the
person who went into debt while spending some $12,000 on over six hun-
dred self-help books—was male. “Feminization,” however, is a charge lev-
ied at any behavior or expression that favors the soft over the hard, the emo-
tional over the logical, the therapeutic and verbal over the stoic and reticent.
Self-help books are perceived as feminine even when they are written by men
(as many of them are). Self-help books are anything but manly, and they
promote a worldview, a culture, that appeals to women rather than to men.
Is this perception accurate? Perhaps with additional research, we can say
with some certainty whether more women than men read self-help books.
However, the perception that it is a feminine genre is definitely out there, and
not just among critics. In fact, I would guess that much of the disdain ac-
corded the genre is a result of this assumption that self-help books, like ro-
mances, are women’s literature—that is, literature that women would read
and that men, therefore, would not. In my own earlier research of the per-
sonal narrative as a folklore genre, I have been puzzled by a similar unease
with a kind of storytelling that is often perceived as characteristic of women
rather than men. Despite clear evidence that there are many men who do tell
personal narratives and many men who do read self-help books, the percep-
tion persists that to be interested in the “personal” or to seek solutions for
personal problems is to be behaving as women behave, and men as well as
many women active in the professional realm do not want to be seen as “act-
ing like women.” Granted, this opinion is simply an opinion. I have not re-
searched this question (but see Stanley Brandes’s discussion in Metaphors of
Masculinity [1980]). Nevertheless, it seems to me that at least some of the
critical distaste for the self-help book can be attributed to this lingering prej-
udice against things perceived as feminine rather than masculine. The criti-
cal reception of self-help books suffers from this stereotype still a part of our
culture, even our “high” and academic culture.
The supposed female reading audience, along with charges of a therapy
model and associated psychobabble, a lack of originality, often poor writing,
and a flight from the virtues of stoicism and self-reliance, then, are some of
the perceptions that cause critics to be wary of saying anything good about
self-help books. Is there any clear contribution the genre makes that could
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66 self-help books
be held up in contrast to these perceived weaknesses? Is there any saving grace

to be found in the self-help book’s obvious popularity, or is it, as some crit-
ics suggest, a national shame? As a folklorist, I am as content to study the self-
help book as a part of America’s expressive culture as I am to study legends
or children’s riddles, protest songs, or blond jokes. Self-help books draw upon
and perpetuate an American worldview. But do they add anything new? And,
if not, why are they so avidly read by so many people?
The Simple Self

The self-help book’s popularity reflects a paradox at the heart of Americans’
perception of themselves. Americans think they are simple selves—broad-
shouldered, active, natural, and unreflective—but the popularity of the self-
help book demonstrates that they are not. The paradox is not in this con-
tradiction but rather in the very self-consciousness that arises with every
agreement to look to and evaluate the “self”—in other words, with every
self-help book that is written and read. I describe this process as a paradox
because the ultimate message of all self-help books is that individuals must
detach themselves from the conditioning imposed by the surrounding cul-
ture. To be happy, to be effective, to be truly a success, the individual must
become a “simple self,” a person free of attachments to the values of the out-
side culture and responsive only to his or her own basic and honest pres-
ence in the world. And yet, of course, with every self-help book such a per-
son reads, the “self” becomes self-conscious and the “simple self,” if it were
ever a possibility, is lost. In fact, we could say that readers of self-help books
become addicted to the very process of examining, pouring attention on,
even chastising themselves—the internal, personal, subjective self.
The two important ingredients in this paradox are the “ultimate mes-
sage” of all self-help books and the simple self. Earlier I discussed the ba-
sic structure of the self-help book, the problem/solution formula. But the
“ultimate message” is something other than this structural requirement.
There are a great many problems posed by the authors of self-help books,
a great many topics or issues addressed through the basic problem/solu-
tion structure. These problems, though varied, do all arise through the
process of enculturation—the education and socialization of individuals
into their own culture, in this case, into American culture. The message that
self-help authors collectively offer their readers in response to these many
problems is that their readers must divest themselves of their need to be
accepted, approved, applauded, or loved by the community that has given
them their culture. They must detach themselves from their own informal
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education handed to them by their families and society and instead learn
a new set of values freely chosen without the pressure of cultural sanction.
What exactly does this mean? How are Stephen Covey’s Seven Habits of
Highly Effective People or Wayne Dyer’s The Sky’s the Limit or Susan Jeffers’s
Feel the Fear and Do It Anyway examples of this message of detachment?
Covey’s seven habits are certainly not new. That was one of Wendy Kamin-
er’s complaints about his book. But Covey’s suggestions, the habits he would
teach people to adopt, can only be approached by his readers after they have
abandoned the “bad” habits they already have. In other words, as Gloria
Steinem says, “Before we can learn, we must unlearn.” The underlying mes-
sage of all self-help books is that readers must no longer be attached to their
former values, tastes, habits, or even loves if they are to learn new ones. No
matter that the new ones are not really new. The principle remains that peo-
ple must unlearn their culture before they can benefit from the teachings of
their self-help mentors.
The irony is that this ultimate message is doomed to failure. People can-
not really cast off the culture that has made them human. Self-help writers
are fighting a losing battle, and some of them know it. Nevertheless, each
book begins with the requisite effort to make the reader aware of the effects
of cultural conditioning and ends with some hope-inspired effort to teach
more “reasoned,” more effective, ways to be and act in the world. But it is
the awareness itself that is the ultimate message of each self-help book. And
while it is true that some individuals will drop certain “old” habits or values
and adopt new behaviors or attitudes upon reading a given book, the pri-
mary achievement of the self-help writer is in making the reader aware of
how cultural conditioning works. And once readers are aware, they will never
again be “innocently” a product of American culture. Instead, enlightened
readers will now bear a responsibility for consciously changing the “self” in
some way, or for continuing, with eyes wide open, to choose the culture that
influences who they are and what they do.
A self-conscious “self” cannot be simple. In his study of the “great vir-
tues,” André Comte-Sponville writes, “Simplicity means forgetting oneself,
forgetting one’s pride and fear. . . . [The simple self] sees no point in self-
examination. . . . He does not take himself seriously or give tragic dimen-
sions to himself or to his life. . . . He has nothing to prove, since he does not
seek to impress. . . . Simplicity is the virtue of wise men and the wisdom of
saints” (1996, 156). A person who reads a self-help book is not an unselfcon-
scious, simple self. And yet, to be a “simple self” free of the attachments
learned through enculturation is the goal set for their readers by most self-
help writers. Anthony de Mello, in The Way to Love, writes, “In order to be
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68 self-help books
genuinely happy there is one and only one thing you need to do: get depro-
grammed, get rid of those attachments” (1991, 23). This piece of advice is
repeated in some guise in all self-help books, but the ideal to which it points
is a person who would never read a self-help book. A simple self would not
seek to change himself or herself or solve some problem in his or her life.
As Comte-Sponville says, the simple self “is not interested enough in him-
self to judge himself” (156).
The paradox, then, is that self-help books perpetuate a complexity and self-
consciousness of character that they advise against, and the writers of such
books depend upon a culture that fosters self-absorption. This is why their
efforts in bringing about change are, at least in general terms, doomed to
failure, but it is likely also why self-help books are with us in such abundance.
A simple self would have no use for self-help books, but the complex and self-
conscious selves that most of us are would seem to require them like a daily
bread. They nourish our hunger for self-examination and cultural critique.
America’s Cultural Cringe

Here let me introduce the concept of “cultural cringe,” for the concept will,
I hope, be useful in outlining the analytical process at work in most success-
ful self-help books. Several years ago I spent some time in Australia, study-
ing some of the differences between Australians’ perception and use of their
“national character” and our own view of ourselves here in the United States.
In that context I often heard the term “cultural cringe” used to express the
feeling of inferiority or at least neglect attributed to the culture of Australia
when compared to British or American culture. In other words, Australians
often saw their own culture as coming up in second place when measured
against the culture of “the mother country” or the upstart United States. And
therefore, they perceived an expectation that they would or should “cringe”
when their own culture was thus exposed as second-rate.
Obviously, the idea that a nation would act as an individual might act—
either cringing in shame or putting a chip on its shoulder—is ludicrous, but
I have always been struck by the image nonetheless. Australia has many won-
derful traditions that are characteristic of and unique to that culture, and yet
this sense of something faulty in its culture was common enough to have
earned it a name—cultural cringe. Australians have clearly asserted a much
more positive national self-image since then, but why would such a judgment
of national character develop in the first place? Where does this deprecation
of one’s own culture come from?
To folklorists, it seems an obvious first step to look to the folklore of a na-
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tion to see how a sense of identity is expressed. From the earliest days of folk-
lore and anthropological research, there has been an underlying belief that
the “primitive” or “folk” traditions—the culture of the common people—
was perhaps exotic or quaint but almost always inferior and flawed, backward,
or even dangerous. Learned gentlemen studying the natives of Borneo or the
peasants of Transylvania saw in the culture of “the other” countless examples
of inferior and erroneous beliefs and practices. Ethnocentrism—the belief that
one’s own culture is superior—was a standard assumption on the part of
Victorian scholars studying the culture of others, even the culture of their own
“lower classes.” Unlike the Australian cultural assessors mentioned above,
educated Europeans of the later 1800s saw their own elite culture as safely
ensconced at the height of civilization and progress. It was the “other” more
lowly cultures that needed to be turned from their superstitious ways toward
the light of educated, civilized behavior.
Some early folklore scholars, such as Sir Edward Burnett Tylor, set about
collecting folk traditions—even the traditions of the uneducated people of
their own countries—with the aim not of preserving those traditions but
instead of eliminating them. In 1871, Tylor wrote that his purpose was “to
expose the remains of crude old culture which have passed into harmful
superstition, and to mark these out for destruction” ([1880] 1924, 16). With
time, that same zeal for reforming folk cultures came to be applied to mod-
ern Western culture itself, due in part to the challenges of socialism, com-
munism, and civil protest movements but also in response to a rise in exis-
tential philosophy and a growing acceptance of cultural relativism. No longer
was it permissible to posit “our” culture as the only standard simply because
it was ours. Other people have a right to see things differently from the way
we do, and their customs and beliefs are not necessarily wrong or inferior,
simply different. Thus argued the cultural relativists.1 One effect of this rel-
ativist stance was a willingness to examine our own culture, not simply with
an aim toward political or social change but rather with a growing recogni-
tion of how cultural conditioning influences our behavior. And often that
behavior is not what we would like it to be. We have come to experience a
kind of cultural cringe.
As noted earlier in considering the structure of self-help books, the authors
and the readers of popular nonfiction depend upon a framework of prob-
lems in need of solution. That problem/solution framework is the formula
for a self-help book. The specific problems, the illogical or unloving behav-
iors about which Americans are cringing, will need to be identified and per-
haps accounted for before the writers can offer their suggestions of how to
deal with those problems. In other words, it would seem that one significant
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70 self-help books
way in which self-help book authors help their readers is in identifying the
traditions or conventional ways of thinking that are already a part of the
culture and that are contributing, through the process of cultural condition-
ing, to their problems. The problem is cultural conditioning, and the sources
of that conditioning are the traditions that surround us from birth on.
Popular writer Scott Peck begins his book A World Waiting to Be Born with
“There is an illness abroad in the land.” Later, on that same page, he says
again, “Something is seriously wrong” (1993b, 3). He is clearly prepared to
tell us what the problem is, and, as do most self-help authors, he adopts what
has come to be called the “medical model,” an assumption that there is ap-
parent in people’s behavior a disease that needs to be treated. He proceeds
to describe the disease, and he posits a kind of “psychospiritual” (his word)
healing as a solution to this disease that has been introduced through the
process of American enculturation. In adopting this metaphor, he is in good
company. Most social scientists have used a disease model as well. Many
writers in both popular and academic circles have agreed at least in spirit with
Sir Edward Burnett Tylor—that the worldview maintained through Ameri-
can culture is the “problem” and that getting rid of the faulty folklore, in-
nocent as it may seem, is the only solution.2
For early reformers like Tylor, it was relatively easy to identify the “units”
of cultural behavior that were perceived as harmful; beliefs, practices, and
behaviors in general that were different from those found among “civilized”
peoples were the things that needed to be stamped out. Thus, many of the
traditions typically called “folklore” were considered the units of transmis-
sion for harmful ideas and attitudes. And Tylor, like a modern self-help book
author, was eager to undertake careful research; to identify the offensive su-
perstitions, beliefs, and practices of the “peasants”; and to enlighten them
with news of knowledge and innovations they would surely find preferable
to their own benighted folkways.
Actually, Tylor was emphatically not writing for the often illiterate “folk”
whose customs he studied. But contemporary self-help book writers are writ-
ing for the modern, urban, quite literate, and sophisticated “folks” whose
behaviors, beliefs, and practices they are bringing under question. And for
contemporary writers, the easy identification of folk traditions as the units
through which these “erroneous” ideas are maintained is not so immediate-
ly apparent. Most writers—other than folklorists—do not usually think of
contemporary, educated people as having folklore, beyond maybe a few harm-
less home remedies for hiccups and maybe some jokes and urban legends.
There are a few self-help book writers who do in fact perceive of the prob-
lematic patterns of thought they are addressing as folklore. Ken Keyes Jr., for
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example, claims that reading his book How to Enjoy Your Life in Spite of It
All will “help in freeing you from buying into any folkways in our culture that
increase your separateness, alienation, neurosis, sickness, and unhappiness”
(1980, 119). That is a heavy load to lay upon the sweet songs, charming tales,
and beautiful epics we usually think of as folklore. How could “Down in the
Valley,” “Br’er Rabbit and the Briar Patch,” or the legend of Johnny Apple-
seed produce separateness, alienation, and neuroses? But of course Keyes is
right; ideas grounded in the “stuff” of folklore are indeed responsible for
many of the problematic aspects of American worldview. In fact, the ideas
themselves are traditional, are folklore, but we often do not use the term
“folklore” to identify abstract ideas that are embedded in the materials of
song or story or the behavior of ordinary people.
It might be helpful to look briefly at how the concept of “tradition” arose
in folklore study. Even the word “folklore” has not always been with us. It
was coined in 1846 by William Thoms, an Englishman who wanted a less
cumbersome term than “popular antiquities” to identify the materials he was
studying. Even in that earlier term, an adjective—antiquated—was being
transformed into a noun, or more precisely, the descriptive feature of old-
ness, of continuity over time, was set aside as a category of things—popular
antiquities are “items” that can somehow be corroborated as having existed
in the minds of people for generations. It is that process of corroboration,
of demonstrating repetition, that is the primary contribution the field of
folklore study has made to the larger intellectual enterprise. Folklorists have
spent two hundred years trying to perfect a system for identifying tradition.
It is not as easy as it may seem.
Earliest efforts simply involved locating analogues of sayings, beliefs, cus-
toms, rhymes, or rituals that could still be found among the peasants of
Europe. But the process became much more complicated as scholars tried
to find parallels of stories and songs in earlier written records or in the oral
performances of contemporaneous cultures. Then the challenge became one
of first identifying the unit of comparison: Do we compare only whole sto-
ries or songs with one another, or do we break the story down into smaller
units, such as specific actions or characters, and compare those? How do we
know when something is traditional, and how do we know how to describe
or list the essence of a narrative idea as a “tradition”? Is something like “death
from humiliation” (AT type 885A; see Aarne and Thompson, 1981, 302) a tra-
dition? Is “compassionate youngest son” (motif L13; see Thompson, 1955) a
tradition? How do we know when we have encountered in a story an exam-
ple of the motif “death from humiliation” or “compassionate youngest son”?
Such motifs are ideas, but it is usually some outside observer, a scholar, who
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72 self-help books
decides that they are ideas that have been repeated, handed down from one
generation to the next or passed along from one group of people to another.
Stith Thompson, in the 1930s, believed it important to create indexes that
would help in the effort to identify whole narratives or parts of narratives as
“traditional.” His six-volume Motif-Index of Folk Literature (1955–58) is an
impressive testimony to his conviction that scholars could identify a tradi-
tion when they saw one. But perhaps more important, the motif index sug-
gests that thousands of ideas have been transmitted through the agency of
the human mind, that people have grasped certain ideas, even psychologi-
cally significant ideas such as humiliation or compassion, and passed them
on to other people as though they were tangible objects with an existence of
their own. Or, to go back to Ken Keyes and his warning about the hazards of
folklore, we can see in the motif index that there are countless “traditions”
that have embedded in them significant, sometimes even dangerous, ideas
that people are ready to accept and take into their lives simply because they
are so seductively a part of their culture.
In the early 1970s, folklorist Alan Dundes suggested the term “folk idea”
for more abstract yet traditional units of worldview, and more recently Hasan
El-Shamy has expanded Thompson’s concept of motif to include key prin-
ciples from cognitive psychology as classificatory devices (1995, 1:xiii). In ef-
fect, El-Shamy has identified such psychological concerns as literally “dying
from shame” as traditional narrative units; they have been found to be a part
of, in this case, Arab culture. Clearly, folklorists have been struggling for a
long time with the problem of identifying tradition, especially tradition that
is abstract in content—an idea, an attitude, or a perspective on life. And it is
precisely these units of ideology that show up in self-help books.
Much more recently, another term has been suggested for a concept closely
aligned with “tradition.” The term “meme” was suggested, almost offhand-
edly, by British biologist Richard Dawkins in the last chapter of his book The
Selfish Gene (1976). Since Dawkins was writing about a biological process
rather than a cultural process through most of his book, his coining of the
term “meme” (from the Greek mimeme) to identify a unit of culture that is
passed on by imitation remained largely undeveloped until the 1990s. Doug-
las Hofstadter, Daniel C. Dennett, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, Aaron Lynch,
and Susan Blackmore have all written on the concept in the last decade. In
Lynch’s book, Thought Contagion: How Belief Spreads through Society, the New
Science of Memes (1996), his discussion pointedly takes up the urban legend
as an example of “thought contagion”—essentially the movement of abstract
ideas through time and space. More telling than the urban legend, which has
specific narrative content, is the great variety of “ideas” large and small that
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are considered examples of memes that, like legend types and fairy tale mo-
tifs, take on a life of their own—ideas that become identifiable and parasitic
“traditions.”
One of the earliest writers to take up Dawkins’s notion of the “meme” was
psychologist and self-help writer Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. In his 1993 book
The Evolving Self: A Psychology for the Third Millennium, Csikszentmihalyi
writes, “Although we might initially adopt memes because they are useful,
it is often the case that after a certain point they begin to affect our actions
and thoughts in ways that are at best ambiguous and at worst definitely not
in our interest. . . . Once a meme is well-established, it tends to generate in-
ertia in the mind, and forces us to pursue its logical consequences to the bit-
ter end” (123–24). The example Csikszentmihalyi offers to illustrate the point
is the development of weaponry—the evolution of the idea that a projectile,
such as a stone, can increase the destructive power of an individual. He then
reviews the slow growth of the idea from arrows to cannonballs to bombs to
incinerating laser rays. The frightening conclusion, then, is that it is the meme
that lives and it is the people, whose minds help in the meme’s survival, who
are its servants.
This is the worrisome theme of a more recent book on the topic, Susan
Blackmore’s Meme Machine (1999). Blackmore, sounding very much like
anthropologists of half a century ago, speaks of memes as “selfish” (from
Dawkins), as “wanting” to be passed on to the next generation. She writes,
“When you imitate someone else, something is passed on. This ‘something’
can then be passed on again and again, and so take on a life of its own. We
might call this thing an idea, an instruction, a behaviour, a piece of infor-
mation . . . but if we are going to study it we shall need to give it a name”
(4). Not only had folklorists gone through this process of recognizing re-
peated patterns long before the word “meme” was coined, but William Bas-
com had articulated in 1954 the same concern with the seeming organic need
of traditions to maintain themselves. Or, as Bascom said, the one overarch-
ing function of all folklore is to maintain the stability of culture (1965, 297).
In this “organic” view, the urban legend of “The Killer in the Backseat” stays
a part of the culture because the idea or expectation of violence against wom-
en is already a part of the culture, and the legend functions to keep it a part
of the culture.
Much earlier in the study of folk traditions, particularly folk narratives,
folklorists grappled with the notion of automigration, the rather mystical idea
that stories moved through time and space more or less on their own. As
folklore theorists considered the real process of transmission, they found this
idea more and more absurd. In 1945, Swedish folklorist Carl Wilhelm von
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74 self-help books
Sydow published a paper in which he stated flatly that we must always take
into account the individual who “passes along” an item of folklore—the
active storyteller, the proverb teller, the pot maker. Granted, patterns can be
recognized and indexes can be created to help us identify traditions as tradi-
tional. But it is an individual who at every turn is responsible for deciding
that the tradition will be passed along and that it will be modified and pre-
sented in a certain way.
The upshot of this controversy is that, while we must recognize that memes
or traditions or floating fairy-tale plots like “Cinderella” do exist, an indi-
vidual is still needed to bring them to form, to performance. What this means
for our study of the self-help book is that the process of cultural enlighten-
ment can be tied to the individual. The author of a self-help book can, in
effect, halt the “meme machine” or the forward march of tradition long
enough for the individual to become aware of his or her own role in the pro-
cess. The individual is not simply a cog in the wheel of traditional ideas roll-
ing through a given culture. The individual self-help book reader, in partic-
ular, can be taught “metacognitive skills” that make the unofficial learning
process more transparent.3
Though most self-help book writers are eager to offer solutions to the
problems they identify and discuss, they are also in general quite aware of
the process of learning that is at the heart of their readers’ engagement with
the book. They know that it is up to each reader to pull himself or herself
away from the traditional thinking that is causing the problems that are the
subject of the book. Anthony de Mello says, “All I can do for you is help you
unlearn” (1990, 17). Unlearning the folklore, unlearning the worldview they
have accepted so easily into their daily lives, is the task self-help book authors
set for their readers. And the effective writer guides the reader through a
necessary process of cultural enlightenment that breaks the chain of cultur-
al determinism, at least for that individual—and perhaps, if for that individ-
ual, then for the human species. That is the hope of self-help book writers—
that they will be able to convince their readers that changing the way they
think, making them more aware of the relationship between belief and be-
havior, will change their lives for the better. That is their own quest and in-
spiration.
How do self-help book writers accomplish this task? Most use the precepts
of cognitive psychology; that is, they introduce the reader to new ways of
thinking and in the process challenge old, troublesome ideas, stories, or be-
liefs. In effect, they argue that despite the many cultural influences that are
always in force in our daily lives, we can learn to recognize when we are let-
03.Ch03.56-75/Dolby 74 2/7/05, 10:18 AM

ting “culture” determine our thinking and behavior and instead do what a
culturally enlightened person would do.
Writers who do this most effectively usually follow a seven-step sequence:
(1) They identify a given problem—for example, poor time management,
failed intimacy in personal relationships, a tendency to overwork or under-
achieve, worry about death, general unhappiness. (2) They explain the prob-
lem’s strength and endurance as a consequence of faulty thinking. (3) They
account for both the presence and persistence of the faulty thinking itself by
examining the traditional (or sometimes inherent or archetypal) sources that
maintain that thinking in the culture. (4) If possible, they offer vehicles for
alternative patterns of thinking—often stories, slogans, or sayings. (5) They
interpret the information they have presented to the reader as supportive of
the new, enlightened thinking they hope to promote. (6) Often, they then
suggest changes in behavior and practice that will move the reader away from
the old thinking and reinforce the new. (7) Finally, they include an epilogue
or conclusion in which they remind the reader that the message of the book
can only be realized in the reader’s own application. This is the writer’s last
word—the rhetorical and inspirational send-off.
Crucial to the process is step 5—interpretation. This is what makes the self-
help book didactic rather than solely informative or inspirational. The writer
clearly intends to teach, to enlighten the reader. And, again, the aim is to teach
for the sake of the reader’s own personal learning and application, not for
the sake of furthering the author’s discipline or simply adding to our gener-
al body of knowledge (though it may do these as well). The stuff of tradi-
tion is examined with the hope that enlightenment may come to the reader.
It is a teacher’s goal more than a healer’s; or, perhaps it is a recognition of
the power of enlightenment to heal. America’s cultural cringe is accepted,
even exploited, as a part of the process of cultural enlightenment.
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4. Giving Advice and Getting Wisdom
One of my favorites among the books I have read for this study is one I men-
tioned earlier, Peter Kramer’s provocatively titled Should You Leave? A Psy-
chiatrist Explores Intimacy and Autonomy—and the Nature of Advice. In the
first chapter, he writes, referring to his popular 1993 volume Listening to
Prozac, “I have written a best-seller, and when a psychiatrist writes a best-
seller, he is next urged to write a book of advice” (1997, 15). Kramer address-
es the significant difference between offering advice to a real “other” and sim-
ply writing in general terms as one would in a self-help book. In fact, he
creates fictional “you”s in the remaining chapters of his book and addresses
his advice to these hypothetical people, claiming, “One way or another, I must
come to know you. Otherwise I will be limited to something that is not quite
advice—perhaps the transmission of values; because what passes for advice
outside the individual encounter is often just the transmission of values” (34).
Nevertheless, because his advisees are fictional, Kramer is doing very self-
consciously what fiction writers do perhaps more intrinsically as part of their
craft—incorporating values and concerns of society and human nature into
the lives and actions of their works’ dramatis personae. And, he is as well
characterizing for his readers some of the leading theories of his discipline
and demonstrating their application to hypothetical cases. He is offering
advice packed with a wealth of intended contextual richness.
And yet I would be surprised to hear that Kramer intended his book pri-
marily for other psychiatrists who hoped to enter the general advice-giving
game. This was not written as a how-to book for advice columnists or self-
help book writers. A few other writers, such as Robert J. Wicks (Sharing Wis-
dom: The Practical Art of Giving and Receiving Mentoring [2000]) or perhaps
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Giving Advice and Getting Wisdom 77
Marsha Sinetar (The Mentor’s Spirit: Life Lessons on Leadership and the Art
of Encouragement [1997]), do seem to be writing for others who hope to
mentor and offer advice, but most self-help writers, including Kramer and
other scholars conscious of their disciplines, are writing with the general
middle-class American reading public in mind. They are writing a very suc-
cessful kind of meta-nonfiction. Kramer is simply more up-front about the
way he is using the tradition itself, more forthcoming in his simultaneous
advice-giving and scrutiny of the practice of writing of self-help books as a
means to guiding others.
In chapter 2, I mentioned the abundance of “metacommentary” through-
out the many self-help books I have examined. Often, this metacommentary
identifies the people who comprise the network of self-help writers. Other
times, it simply states some observation about self-help books, noting their
popularity, their typical subject matter, even their noted failings. Unlike foot-
noting in clearly academic writing, this system of referencing other writers
and other self-help books serves to reinforce the tradition itself rather than
to acknowledge previous research. Self-help writers are sometimes, as in the
case of Peter Kramer, almost painfully aware of the tradition in which they
are writing, and they comment on that tradition in terms that acknowledge
its inadequacy to the task of advising unknown readers. And yet, they pro-
ceed with the task at hand; they write and publish self-help books. Why? Is
it simply to make money? Is it to enhance the ego with a popular publica-
tion? Is the tradition itself a flawed form of pop culture peddled like snake-
oil remedies to a gullible public, as Tom Tiede would have us believe?
Careful and dedicated writers such as Kramer or, say, Robert C. Solomon
(About Love [2001]) are enough to convince me otherwise. I believe that
they do see themselves as educators. The missing element in any self-help
book is, as Kramer laments, the advisee’s life story, the context or real-life
situation of the reader. The writer must persuade his or her readers to bring
their own lives and their own questions to their reading of self-help liter-
ature. It is the perennial dilemma of the teacher who lectures to a class of
five hundred—how can an educator ensure that each student gets the most
he or she can from the lecture?
The dean of faculties office at my university recently granted me a sum-
mer fellowship in support of my efforts to create a graduate course to be
offered via the Internet. As I worked on the course design and lessons, I re-
alized that I had never taught a course to students I would never see. When
I stopped and thought about it, I found the notion strangely disconcerting.
I enjoy teaching; I enjoy the interaction; I enjoy the feeling that I am con-
tributing in some way to the lives of my students. In teaching an Internet
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78 self-help books
course, would I still experience that sense of engagement, or—and this was
my real worry—would I instead feel that I was simply putting some special-
ized knowledge out on the market, “selling wisdom” to people I would nev-
er meet face-to-face? I am more sanguine now about the issue, but initially I
felt much as I suspect many of the writers of popular nonfiction feel—slightly
awkward in my role as a “distance” educator.
Not all self-help book writers see themselves first and foremost as educa-
tors, and likely not all readers of self-help books approach their reading in
the spirit of a student. Perhaps there are some who, like the desperate seek-
ers Wendy Kaminer envisions, are simply looking for a stereotypical shaman,
a curandero, a psychological folk healer who has the power to cure their ills,
whatever they may be. But if that is indeed what they are seeking, they will
find relatively few of the writers of self-help books who offer that brand of
faith healing; most writers are eager to teach rather than to simply offer for-
mulas. Most clearly see themselves as concerned—if distant—mentors, as
teachers, or, if as healers, then as healers who educate rather than as conju-
rors who prescribe magic rituals and practices to obedient believers.
Many self-help book writers state directly that they perceive their role as
that of educator. Longtime editor of Parade magazine Walter Anderson titled
his book The Confidence Course: Seven Steps to Self-Fulfillment, and the book
jacket calls the book “the most important class you never took in school.” In
her book Feel the Fear and Do It Anyway, Susan Jeffers says, “You may be sur-
prised and encouraged to learn that while the inability to deal with fear may
look and feel like a psychological problem, in most cases it isn’t. I believe it is
primarily an educational problem” (1987, 4). Marsha Sinetar explains that she
writes self-help books as a consequence of her own early habit of seeking
education and mentoring through impersonal sources, such as books:
Not until 1993 did I scale back my corporate practice to accommodate a grow-
ing desire to write. In my youth, however, encouragements were rare and came
primarily from the mentor’s spirit: impersonal love. I mean by “impersonal”
those positive forces all around us, even from dispassionate or inanimate sources
like the people we don’t know—poets and actors—or books and cultural icons.
Through high school and college I was prematurely self-supporting, living
largely on my own. I sought out mentors, but helpful, caring persons capable
of empathizing with me on a deeply relevant level of experience were not readily
available. Out of my loneliness and sense of being different, I searched out the
mentor’s spirit in everyone and everything. That habit served me well. It seems
worth sharing. (1997, 2–3)
For a writer like Sinetar, the task of a self-help book author is to guide
readers in their self-education. In this light, the practice of selecting and read-
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ing a self-help book is a procedure not so very different from that undertak-
en by the average undergraduate in signing up for a variety of courses in a
modern university.
Until recently, with the growing reemphasis on core courses and integrated
programs, most colleges and universities fell prey to what Gerald Graff calls
the “course fetish.” He explains, “The courses being given at any moment on
a campus represent any number of rich potential conversations within and
across the disciplines. But since students experience these conversations only
as a series of monologues, the conversations become actual only for the mi-
nority who can reconstruct them on their own” (1992, 106). It is this “recon-
structing” of the integrative conversation on their own that is essential for
students who seek to be educated. In effect, the integration of knowledge into
an education—into wisdom—is something they must do on their own, as
they themselves integrate the thinking they have engaged in through each
course into a cohesive whole.
How is the situation different or similar for an individual who chooses to
“take a course” offered in the form of a readable self-help book? The subject
matter may be quite different from that of a typical college course, but the
process of solitary integration of the learning—of self-education—is surely
similar. The goal in the case of the self-help book reader is to learn a more
effective way of dealing with life’s problems and at the same time to integrate
that new knowledge into an emerging personal philosophy of life. The pro-
cess is both educational and informal or folkloric. It is an often unrecognized
but integral part of the process of lifelong learning.
Self-Help Books and the Construction of a

Personal Philosophy
An important assumption here, then, is that self-help books are written and
read for the purpose of helping individuals build a personal philosophy.
There are other goals and motives as well, of course, but the objective of
contributing to the construction of a personal philosophy looms somewhere
behind the decision to write or read self-help books. A book such as Ronald
Gross’s Peak Learning: How to Create Your Own Lifelong Education Program
for Personal Enlightenment and Professional Success (1999) offers some prac-
tical guidance to readers of self-help books, but in general, the process of
building a personal philosophy itself has been neglected as an area of study.
In part, this neglect can be explained by the difficulty in studying a pro-
cess, any process. People are certainly aware of the notion of “process” and
often have an intuitive sense of how a given process works. But discussing
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80 self-help books
process requires a movement from the concrete to the abstract and back to
the concrete again. In Peter Senge’s insightful study of systems theory, The
Fifth Discipline, the author uses a series of diagrams to examine and repre-
sent a process—in this case, flow within a system. Unfortunately, even dia-
grams must use abstract terms and concepts, and the people asked to fill in
the abstractions with concrete examples may not “see” those slots as others
would. Though such visualizations are often more memorable than verbal
discussion, inevitably diagrams oversimplify. But Senge’s book does effective-
ly illustrate the need to identify fundamental principles that define a process.
By convention, when any process is so defined, it is also classified by the
kind of materials involved as well as the principles of selection—as in nam-
ing the flow of capital an “economic” process or the decisions on time use
a “time management” process. The process involved in building a person-
al philosophy is a personal learning process or what I would call a folklore
process. The process entails our exercising principles for combining cultural
and personal belief into a coherent philosophy, and it is accomplished in
large part through unofficial channels. To call something a “folklore pro-
cess” is to characterize that process as central to the creation of an individ-
ual’s sense of identity but also as both informal and traditional. Often things
that are so characterized tend to be neglected and taken for granted. A few
folklorists have examined the lives of individuals to see if a dominant world-
view can be extracted from their narratives and commentary, but rarely has
the process of building a personal philosophy been studied. An introduc-
tory consideration of this process is one objective I hold in writing this
book.
The Skill of Asking the Right Question

A cursory glance through the titles of the books in the bibliography at the
close of this study would suggest that the authors see their books as func-
tioning in many different ways—some to help people achieve financial or
career success, some to guide people toward better health, some to inform
people on what God or the world is really like, some to instruct people in how
to overcome certain faults or addictions, some simply to advise people on
how to be happy and get along in the world. I would argue that, despite their
varied titles and specific topics, the roughly three hundred books of popu-
lar nonfiction I have read for this study all share one practical objective: to
teach readers to see reality and to respond to that reality rather than to the
ineffective “truths” and misinformation their culture has given them. In other
words, self-help writers hope to guide readers toward a reliable personal
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philosophy, a reasoned and wise philosophy, rather than toward the unex-
amined and faulty set of cultural assumptions they inherited along with all
of the other folklore, useful or not, that fills their heads and hearts.
And to do this, they seem most consistently to encourage their readers to
ask the very questions that advice-seekers usually ask—but with the recog-
nition that the answers will always reflect the values of this American cul-
ture, or, as Peter Kramer said, our generalized answers will simply give us
“news about norms” (1997, 36). In other words, the practical concerns of self-
help books are the very issues that draw into the readers’ conscious thought
the values that will form the basis of their emerging personal philosophies.
We will know how to behave, we will know how to respond, because we will
know the fundamental principles of our own working personal philosophies.
Thus would self-help writers tie together practical wisdom and shared ideas
and teach their readers to discover ways to answer their own questions.
What are these questions? When we think of how personal philosophies
are formed, we may envision the lone seeker climbing to the mountaintop
and asking the reclusive guru, “What is the meaning of life?” Instead, self-
help writers imply in their works that the more mundane questions, what
Herbert Gans called “prosaic issues,” are the ones that, when answered, re-
veal and articulate our personal philosophies. Taking a cue from Kramer, I
see his question “Should I leave?” as one of these essential philosophy-invok-
ing questions. I might reverse the question to its opposite: “Should I stay?”
In either case, the answer is simple and for most writers always the same—
no, you should not leave; yes, you should stay.
In effect, the advice is almost always to stay the course—at least until an
important life skill is learned, one that will serve in all other such situations.
The argument is that if a person learns this important life skill, he or she
will no longer need to ask an expert, “Should I leave?” Ultimately, the one
life skill everyone needs is confidence—the ability to trust, to love, to accept
what is. Whatever it is called, it is a competence rather than a feeling, and
therefore it can be taught. Advice-givers see their role as coaching others in
their efforts to gain competence in love, in trusting others, in accepting the
world as it is, and ultimately, as Robert Solomon says, in redefining and
improving oneself (2001, 155). Self-help writers are rhetorically effective
cheerleaders on one hand and probing teachers on the other. The aim is to
guide individuals along a path of personal development that continues af-
ter the book is finished, or as Gregg D. Jacobs explains in his book The An-
cestral Mind, to teach them skills that they “can use without relying on the
intercession of a doctor or a medication” (2003, 82). To do that, self-help
writers must ask readers to envision every action (or inaction) in their lives
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82 self-help books
as part of a long chain of illustrations tied to a principle that accepts life the
way it really is, without fear but instead with ample confidence.
In other words, self-help writers offer to teach their readers not simply
practical competence in life activities but also the positive attitude that bol-
sters the likelihood of success. Self-help writers teach readers to be confident
and to display an attitude of love—love of self, love of others, love of the
planet, love of the universe, love of God, and, in particular, love of life as it
really is (or at least as the writers endeavor to explain that “it really is”). They
teach readers to substitute this capacity for love and optimism in place of the
much too common response of fear, with its many ill effects on daily behav-
ior and general attitude. Not all authors have stated this goal so bluntly—
characterizing as a skill or competency something that is more often viewed
as an emotion—but all seem to assume that what they have to offer must be
taught, that an individual is not born knowing what they have to teach, not
born knowing how to love life, other people, or even themselves.
Theirs is an educational thesis with a stable structural formula, similar to
what folklorist Alan Dundes has identified as the basic structure of all nar-
rative: lack and lack liquidated. As suggested in the introduction, when ap-
plied to popular nonfiction, this basic structure becomes a suggestion that
something is wrong with us, with the culture that guides or programs us, or
with our information about the world (lack), and a suggestion of what might
be done to correct this problem (lack liquidated). In more conventional
terms, then, all statements of the “problem” call for our seeing reality more
clearly, and all “solutions” offered are some form of teaching the skill of lov-
ing life as it really is—a conscious practice of acceptance, trust, and care. And
I would like to suggest as well that people who read these books in an effort
to right the wrongs of their lives and learn the skill of loving life as it really is
are engaging in the folklore process of building a personal philosophy.
The abundance and variety of books can be explained in part precisely
because the books are used in a folklore process. One of the defining char-
acteristics of folklore is variation: witness the many parodies of “Roses are
red . . .” or the many recipes for the world’s best chili or the variety of duck
decoys or quilt patterns. Similarly, the authors of these many self-help books
may be offering answers or solutions that can be abstracted to the single func-
tional skill of learning to see reality more clearly and practice trust and love,
but their formulation of “what is wrong” with society or individuals—their
critique that needs to be addressed—takes many forms. Each author, in other
words, describes in a different way the problem to which the answer is always
“to learn to see reality clearly and to practice the skill of love”—even if “love”
in this case simply means caring enough about one’s performance in the
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world to be careful and competent. These discrete formulations of everyday

problems, then, are responsible for the great variety of self-help books, and
this variety is what makes the whole enterprise of writing such books a cre-
ative and productive one—or, as folklorists would say, a creative use of cul-
tural resources.
Self-Help Books and the Folklore Process

Books of popular nonfiction imply a folklore process at work in two ways.
One is in the writing of the books. Though some books of popular nonfic-
tion are strikingly original in tone or voice, the process involved in their
composition can be compared to the performance of highly formulaic folk-
lore, such as the epic. Like the griot singing an epic, the writer of a self-help
book makes use of certain traditional resources and combines them in ways
that have come to be expected by the audience or reader. Self-help books
are formulaic and didactic; that is, they all follow a basic pattern of critique
and solution. Other kinds of popular literature are often compared to folk-
lore because of their formulaic nature—romances, mysteries, adventure
stories, rags-to-riches sagas. But, as we saw in chapter 2, there is no one
predictable style or subtype of popular nonfiction. Self-help books take a
variety of forms—some parables or framed stories, some sequential steps
in a guidebook, some analytical segments built upon a well-known text,
some a series of short essays expanding upon a list of insights or themes.
The formulaic structure of self-help books is more abstract, tied as it is to
the overarching objective of teaching the reader to replace fearful and inef-
fective thinking and behavior with insight and acceptance of reality along
with love and confidence and its many positive effects. However, many other
elements of the books are more concrete and clearly traditional, and these
other traditional elements are significant in our understanding of how writ-
ers create rhetorically effective self-help books.
If I were concerned only with the process of writing such books, we could
move immediately to a discussion of what these traditional elements are and
how they figure in the process of composition. In fact, chapters 5, 6, and 7
do exactly that; they examine the proverbs or sayings, the stories, and the
traditional beliefs used in popular nonfiction. But my focus here is not sim-
ply on the authors and their performances as reflected in the variety of self-
help books—or texts—examined in this study. Rather, I have argued that an
equally important question asks how these books are used by readers in their
efforts to build a personal philosophy. This question highlights a second way
the folklore process is implicated in the study of popular nonfiction. And,
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84 self-help books
strangely, it is a question that strains our current understanding of what is

meant by the “folklore process.”
Normally, folklorists engage in ethnographic research in an effort to ad-
dress how “artistic communication in small groups” happens. Even when we
stretch the “small group” to include mass media productions or museum
exhibits, we still expect to deal with “artistic communication” in some way—
specifically, in what we can treat as a “text.” We record a bluesman singing, a
storyteller talking, children riddling; we photograph quilts and carvings,
houses and barns; we videotape people dancing, teenagers playing the doz-
ens, graffiti artists painting, healers healing, worshipers worshiping. Always
we expect to provide ourselves with a text, an artifact, a performance we can
then study. One of the best examples of this research practice can be seen in
Richard Bauman’s Story, Performance, and Event: Contextual Studies of Oral
Narrative (1986), a book in which the author looks at a few oral stories and
discusses at great length how the context affects the text—how everything
in the storyteller’s cultural surrounds conspire to give us those very partic-
ular texts.
I could treat each of the self-help books I have read for this study as a text
ripe for the process of deconstruction. I could work back from each book and
try to account for its final form and content by citing the cultural and per-
sonal elements that influenced each author’s literary “performance.” In do-
ing this, I would be invoking two assumptions currently a part of most folk-
lore research: that the artifact we study is composed in performance and that
the performer uses the cultural frame of reference shared with his or her
audience to create a performance that is meaningful. There is no reason to
quibble with these assumptions; they work very well for any “artistic” text—
actually any artifact at all that can be captured in some form that allows us
to examine it. The problem here is that these assumptions derive from a ver-
bal model. Performance theory grew out of studies of oral epic and the eth-
nography of speaking. It helps tremendously with the analysis of texts. Even
the performance of a traditional ballad like “Barbara Allen,” in which the
singer tries to sing the song just as she learned it, benefits from attention to
what happens as the performer brings to bear all of her cultural frame of
reference as she sings.
An author like Wayne Dyer, writing his tenth best-selling self-help book,
could fruitfully be studied using the methods associated with performance
theory. Dyer even helpfully cites other writers whose self-help books he has
read. Careful analysis would reveal how the cultural context and the genre
of self-help books have been incorporated, consciously or not, into the writ-
ing of his latest book. But when we look at how Dyer’s book is used by an
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individual reader, our understanding of the process is complicated by the fact

that there is no performed “text” to analyze, no artifact from which to work
backward toward the act of composition. A reader does not create a text but
rather builds a personal but tacit belief system. And possibly, the reader uses
not only Dyer’s tenth best-seller but also all his other books and the books
of many other writers, not to mention cultural resources quite apart from
the assortment of self-help books read.
The process of creating this tacit belief system, this nonverbalized text, is a
folklore process as well, but we might want to identify its basic steps in a slightly
different way. There is another conceptualization of the folklore process that
uses a material rather than a verbal model. I was first introduced to this way
of articulating the folklore process when I sat years ago as a student in a class
taught by Henry Glassie, a folklorist who often studies material culture—folk
crafts, folk art, folk architecture. Glassie was attracted to Claude Lévi-Strauss’s
metaphor of the artisan as bricoleur—someone who brings together materi-
als that happen to be at hand and uses them to carry out the task of building
what needs to be built. If we think of an individual reader as a bricoleur, we can
imagine that person gathering information and wisdom from a variety of
sources and using them in the task of “building” a personal philosophy. Of
course, the philosophy thus created is no more material than it is verbal, but
the metaphor of the bricoleur allows us to envision the process, much as Peter
Senge’s diagrams helped in explaining that process. The question then is how
the bricoleur selects the materials that he or she ends up using.
The process of selection is constrained by culture, as Lévi-Strauss argues,
but it is also influenced by the reader’s own personal history and goal in read-
ing. These three elements each contribute in a significant way to the overall
choices that are made. We could outline this alternative model of the folk-
lore process as follows:
1. The bricoleur brings together the materials that are at hand for working on a
project.
2. Three things affect the process of selection:
a. The bricoleur’s cultural frame of reference
b. The bricoleur’s self, personal history, or personal narrative
c. The goal of the project
3. The bricoleur carries out the project, but the end product may remain
unarticulated; it may instead be a tacit belief system that supports and
influences behavior.
The easiest ingredients to study are those that make up the cultural frame of
reference—the traditional elements. And, the goal of the project is a rough
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86 self-help books
approximation of the stated assumption of this study—that the reader hopes

to build a personal philosophy. The wild card is the reader’s own self and life
history. In every case, the reader must supply concrete examples to flesh out
the principles discussed by reflecting upon his or her own life.
Some insights can be gained from looking at research in adult education,
in particular the work of French scholar Pierre Dominicé. Along with Amer-
ican educators interested in what Jack Mezirow calls “transformative learn-
ing,” Dominicé examines the role that reflection on an individual’s life his-
tory plays in solidifying learning. In Dominicé’s book Learning from Our
Lives: Using Educational Biographies with Adults (2000), we can see how the
practice of creating “educational biographies” encourages adult learners to
examine the effects of various educational experiences on their understand-
ing of life. In other words, there is an increasing awareness among adult ed-
ucators that the process of reflection—of building a personal system of un-
derstanding, a personal philosophy—is essential to the overall process of
adult education. And Dominicé’s book discusses at length the advantages in
requiring adult learners to tie together their own life stories and their sense
of themselves as people who have learned from the lives they live.
We can see, then, that without such required and formalized reflection,
the more typical folklore process at play when a reader reads a self-help
book leaves us with an unarticulated “text.” The object or thing that grows
out of an individual’s reading and thinking remains an unexpressed amal-
gam of inchoate ideas, a personal but tacit belief system. Nevertheless, this
“product”—this unarticulated educational biography—functions well for
the reader. And within it are some components that we can more easily
identify and study—the traditional elements that make up the cultural
frame of reference.
The Cultural Frame of Reference

The notion of a “cultural frame of reference” derives from two separate con-
cepts in the field of folklore research. When the two concepts are brought
together, we have a particularly rich analytic tool. The first concept is tied to
the common phrase “frame of reference.” Usually, in day-to-day speech, this
phrase is used to identify a set of accepted values or a body of shared infor-
mation that allows a person to interpret the meaning or relative importance
of a given item. Thus, in his book Frame Analysis, Erving Goffman sets out
“to isolate some of the basic frameworks of understanding available in our
society for making sense out of events” (1974, 10). Having a frame of refer-
ence allows us to understand; without one, we have only our instincts and
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raw senses to guide us. The source of a frame of reference is thus either sub-
jective experience or interaction with other people, a reference group.
The concept of a folk or culture group is the second part of the larger con-
cept of a cultural frame of reference. Dan Ben-Amos, in offering a definition
of folklore in context, wrote, “For the folkloric act to happen, two social con-
ditions are necessary: both the performer and the audience have to be in the
same situation and be part of the same reference group” (1972, 12). To be part
of the same reference group may mean something so limited as to be mem-
bers of the same nuclear family, or it may mean simply to be members of the
same country. Ultimately, what decides whether one person is part of the
same reference group as another person is whether they share the “stuff” that
would be referred to—in effect, whether they share traditions. E. D. Hirsch
Jr., in his book Cultural Literacy (1987), capitalizes on this notion of a shared
cultural frame, emphasizing the advantages to students in being a part of the
“educated” group whose cultural references are most highly valued and most
often alluded to in our society.
Sometimes the traditions that are referred to are not easily identified; of-
ten they might more correctly be called “patterns” or “worldview” or “folk
ideas,” and often, especially in those instances, the “reference” is not a con-
scious one but rather a functional but unconscious use. Still, some specific
kinds of folklore—a group’s corpus of sayings, stories, practices, and beliefs—
do constitute much of the cultural frame of reference. I would offer the fol-
lowing as a definition for the concept: A cultural frame of reference is a men-
tal framework that holds the cumulative repertoire of traditions and cultural
patterns of behavior and thought shared by members of a group. Tied to this
definition are three assumptions:
1. There must be something to refer to: the traditions.

2. The frame of reference is group-based (cultural) rather than idiosyncratic.
3. Though the frame is culture-based, not everyone will share every element
that makes up the frame with everyone else who is a part of the group;
furthermore, because every person has a separate life history, each individual’s
constellation of groups to which he or she belongs is unique.
The cultural frame of reference is what allows a listener to make sense of

communications from other people, and often it is what attracts people, by
its very familiarity, to the message conveyed or convinces them of its truth.
The cultural frame of reference is used at both ends of a communication—
by the encoder and the decoder. But, again, the resources used in this way
are not simply verbal ones but all traditions. The field of folklore study is
essentially a two-hundred-year-old effort to identify the traditions that make
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88 self-help books
up the world’s discrete and cumulative cultural frames of reference. It is

important to view this accumulation of cultural knowledge as only one por-
tion of the whole that contributes to the individual’s construction of a per-
sonal philosophy. As suggested earlier, the individual’s own life and experi-
ence (including biological, psychological, and environmental factors) and the
goal of self-education itself influence the process. The cultural frame of ref-
erence is a significant portion nonetheless; it is the part that both feeds and
draws upon socially constructed reality. In this study of popular nonfiction,
it is the cultural frame of reference shared by the majority of Americans that
is most influential. It is the cultural frame that adds a social dimension to
the solitary act of reading a self-help book.
Self-Education and the Concept of a Learning Project

Self-help books are read primarily by adults but only rarely as part of the
regular college and university curriculum. Such books certainly could be a
part of the college curriculum. Edward LeRoy Long Jr., in Higher Education
as a Moral Enterprise, suggests that there are three functions or responsibil-
ities that must be addressed by any college or university: (1) “maturation and
enrichment of selfhood”; (2) “discovery/construction, extension, and dissem-
ination of knowledge and culture”; and (3) responsibility for “the well-be-
ing of society” (1992, 6). Most often, the second function is allowed to dom-
inate, with the first and third seen as less significant aspects of college life.
While some colleges are making efforts to balance these three functions, most
have not incorporated all three into the curriculum. The enrichment of the
“self” in particular is left to the individual as an extracurricular choice.
Still, the current decade promises to be a period of great change among
institutions of higher learning. Curriculum is being reexamined. Perhaps
more striking than curriculum revision is the growing attention to vocational
training, service learning, human and organizational management, continu-
ing education, “returning” students, distance education, and on-line courses;
these and other emerging features of the contemporary expanding universi-
ty are bringing a new challenge to the enterprise of higher education in Amer-
ica. One aspect of this challenge is a renewed and more urgent interest in
practical rather than theoretical questions about how learning happens, no
matter what the subject. Does learning happen best in well-organized group
presentations? Can learning happen in solitary programs or one-on-one in-
teractions via the Internet? Should learning be participatory, or are lectures
effective? Are adult learners more likely to set their own goals for learning
rather than depend upon the institution to tell them what is most important?
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As institutions of higher education are grappling with these issues, the

unofficial self-help “movement” has found ways of addressing them as well,
especially as these issues affect learning about the self and the learner’s own
behavior. A major consideration in either case is whether the individual learn-
er will work with others in a group or instead independently, with only au-
thoritative resources and his or her own learning goal as a guide. Looking at
my own involvement with the learning process as an example, I can say that
for all but the first five years of my life, I have been a student or a teacher;
my own experience with the process of learning clearly has involved the con-
text of a group—the typical classroom setting. I appreciate and endorse the
advantages of learning in a group setting; there is nothing in a solitary learn-
ing situation to match the effects of a stimulating discussion.
Nevertheless, circumstances cannot always offer that ideal. Joseph Kett’s
1994 study chronicles the emergence of adult education and attests to the ef-
forts people have made to find group contexts for learning, even in nonaca-
demic settings. In America, from the colonial period on, there has been a
strong interest in clubs, library societies, books, and institutions that support
self-improvement among adults not enrolled in regular schooling—in other
words, in self-education. Kett’s survey takes account of the group venues his-
torically available for intellectual, social, and spiritual improvement of the self.
Today, churches, synagogues, health clubs, library discussion groups, noncred-
it college workshops, even bookstore coffee shops continue this tradition. In
addition, there are a growing number of institutions, such as the California
Institute of Integral Studies or the Whidbey Institute in Clinton, Washington,
dedicated to the process of “transformative learning,” as Jack Mezirow named
this self-developmental adult learning practice some years ago (1978).
Kett mentions as well the positive response people in the earlier decades
of the twentieth century had to the few self-help books just beginning to
appear on publishing lists—books such as Dale Carnegie’s Art of Public
Speaking (1915) and How to Win Friends and Influence People (1936). Such
books attested to an increasingly popular independent self-help reading
practice that grew up alongside the group-oriented venues for self-educa-
tion. By the 1960s, there began a surge in publishing such books of popular
nonfiction that continues unabated into the present. Readers are now offered
a wide selection of books that can be discussed in group settings or, more
often, read in private and used by the individual as part of a self-directed
learning program. As noted earlier, by 1994, the abundance of books had
already created a need for The Authoritative Guide to Self-Help Books, which
culled through more than one thousand self-help books available in order
to help people decide which would be most worth reading.
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90 self-help books
To be worth reading, according to John W. Santrock, Ann M. Minnett, and

Barbara D. Campbell, the authors of the Authoritative Guide, a self-help book
would have to be judged beneficial for the reader by a group of professional
mental health experts. In other words, their concern in rating the books was
whether the authors offered sound psychological information and advice and
whether the content was presented effectively. In effect, once again, Long’s
second function—the responsible dissemination of knowledge and culture—
is the primary goal, and it is a worthy one. But the books are not assessed for
their effectiveness in conveying a perspective on the self nor in instilling a
desire to work for the well-being of society—the other two charges Long
identifies with educational enterprises. I would argue that most readers ex-
pect self-help books to serve all three educational functions. And increasingly
they seek out books that have something to say about the spiritual dimen-
sion of life, in other words, books that help them build a philosophy of life.
They expect such books to serve their own unofficial and sometimes unrec-
ognized plan for self-education.
K. Patricia Cross, in her classic study Adults as Learners, devoted several
pages to a discussion of the incidence of “self-directed learning,” reviewing
in particular the work of Allen Tough, who, in the early 1970s, had introduced
the concept of a “learning project.” Tough’s definition of a learning project
brings together a series of related episodes: “In each episode more than half
of a person’s total motivation is to gain and retain certain fairly clear knowl-
edge and skill, or to produce some other lasting change in himself” (qtd. in
Cross, 1981, 63). Other researchers have considered more generally the way
learning projects function within the sphere of adult education. Malcolm
Knowles identifies the “problem-centered orientation” as most characteris-
tic of adult learning in general. It is in the articulation of the problem itself
that most adult learners seek assistance through outside sources—paid ex-
perts, friends, and books. According to research in the late 1970s, books were
the third most common resource consulted in individual learning projects.
I would suspect that they are an even more common resource today, along
with a growing dependence on the Internet.
A typical learning project is self-initiated, self-planned, and self-directed.
However, the individual learner, as Knowles suggested, often has trouble ar-
ticulating the problem he or she feels compelled to address. Self-help books
serve this need well. As I suggested earlier, every author states a lack that needs
liquidating, a problem that needs solving, and the problem is stated in terms
that are personally relevant to the individual reader. In choosing and read-
ing a book, readers recognize the theme or problem addressed in the book
as their own, or at least as one related to the question at the heart of the of-
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ten unorganized but yet compelling learning project guiding the choice of
reading matter. Self-help books are not bought on whim but rather on pur-
pose. And that purpose is to serve the goal of the reader’s learning project,
even if that learning project has not yet been clearly outlined, even if it is
implicit and emergent rather than explicit and fixed.
Philosophical Self-Help as a Learning Project

I have construed the goal of building a personal philosophy as an educational
but also a philosophical or spiritual endeavor, an activity that serves the in-
dividual’s need to understand reality and personal experience and learn to
live a good and enjoyable life. I have included most self-help and other pop-
ular nonfiction books among the resources used in such a project. How does
reading yet another book on career choices or how to break an addiction or
how to manage after a divorce represent an attempt to build a personal phi-
losophy? The bricoleur will seek out and use what is at hand. These are the
books that are available, and their usefulness can be assumed to some degree
by their popularity. The implication would be that people who are under-
taking their own learning projects are buying and reading the self-help books
that stay in print, and especially the books of authors who more than once
make the best-seller list. Still, we must assume that something other than
simply availability determines which books are found most useful. The book
needs to fit into each reader’s individual learning project.
A learning project that involves self-help books may take on different guises
at various times. Someone working on a learning project may choose to par-
ticipate in workshops or discussion groups in which a particular book is used.
For example, Linda J. Vogel stresses the importance of the group in adult
religious education: “Teaching and learning in communities of faith must
incorporate a dialogue—where all have an opportunity both to listen and to
be heard. Teaching begins with what people already know and offers tools
for working toward a consensus where all can benefit. . . . [This process]
compels us to listen to others, to build community, to clarify problems, and
then to work toward a more just world” (1991, xii). Often such involvement
in community is as important as the subject matter itself. Some people learn
much more easily through dialogue and discussion and the stimulation of a
workshop. But, in general, Americans seek a balance between community
involvement and individualism, as Robert Bellah and his colleagues suggest
in Habits of the Heart. Clearly, for many readers, reading a book in solitude
and pondering its message in private can be equally satisfying.
A number of writers of self-help books have assumed this second alterna-
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92 self-help books
tive and have offered throughout their books opportunities for reflection,
questions or assignments that readers may or may not use in their own learn-
ing projects. Sam Keen and Anne Valley-Fox’s early success with the 1973 ver-
sion of Your Mythic Journey (1989) speaks to the need many people (authors
and readers) feel for having a “text” or artifact that captures the reader’s learn-
ing in some fixed form. Drawing upon their work with Joseph Campbell, Keen
and Valley-Fox introduced the notion of a “personal mythology” and encour-
aged readers to answer questions and build a story (or several stories) that
would represent the reader’s own expressive myth. Some books leave open
spaces on the page for readers to write their own thoughts. Some encourage
readers to keep a daily journal. Some suggest ways that readers might express
their thoughts through various creative activities—art, dance, poetry, or music.
Some direct people toward social service. In every such case, one objective is
to have some “thing” to show for the learning that has taken place.
As we discussed earlier, often the bricoleur’s task is to build a formless sys-
tem of belief, a personal philosophy that cannot be (or at least is not) ex-
pressed in a concise and fixed text. In this case, the learning project has a clear
goal, but that goal does not entail the creation of a text, artifact, or perfor-
mance. Our query becomes that of the tree falling in the forest—is there a
philosophy if it is never expressed, never written down or given voice, even
in a rudimentary way? As a teacher, I will argue that better learning is achieved
when learners articulate what they have learned. So I will side with those
writers who offer opportunities for readers to record their own thoughts in
some way. On the other hand, we must assume that reading alone also has
its effect. Self-help books are useful in learning projects that seek to build for
the reader a personal philosophy, even if that philosophy remains in the tac-
it dimension. Furthermore, the real “application” of a tacit belief system or
personal philosophy occurs in the personal behavior of the individual, in real
life, rather than in the creation of a written or performed text. Life lived be-
comes the true application, the text.
In the next chapter, we shall look at some of the nonverbalized ideas be-
hind this tacit application—some of the often hidden themes that lurk in the
background when readers take the lessons of self-help writers to heart.
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5. Memes, Themes, and Worldview
At the heart of all self-help books is a professed disenchantment—profound

or mild—with conventional ways of thinking, with the worldview that is a
part of American culture. The authors of self-help books universally adopt
the premise that what they have to offer is a new way of thinking that will—
to the benefit of the reader and ultimately the world—replace the old. Their
task is a rhetorical one; they must persuade their readers to adopt the new
and cast off the old. As have teachers and prophets from earlier times, they
claim to bring a new philosophy to the common people, and they want to
present it in a way that people will find convincing. This means that some
aspects of the presentation will have to be already familiar to the audience.
Like Jesus in the New Testament, many writers have used the everyday genres
of story and aphorism to teach and persuade. But they have also simply ad-
dressed directly the faulty “ways of thinking” they deem in need of revision.
They have identified and challenged the “folk ideas” that comprise our
American worldview.
Are We Talking about Myth?

In the first few paragraphs of his article “Folk Ideas as Units of Worldview,”
Alan Dundes explains the distinction folklorists make between the category
“myth” and other larger, more amorphous and inclusive notions often called
“myth” by people outside the field of folklore studies. He admits that the
practice of using the term “myth” to refer only to sacred oral narratives is
confined to folklorists and anthropologists, and he raises the question of what
might be done about the looser view of myth that includes ideas, beliefs,
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94 self-help books
faulty reasoning, themes, and other general elements of worldview. He pro-

poses that the term “folk ideas” be used for some aspects of this loose cate-
gory and offers the following definition: “By ‘folk ideas,’ I mean traditional
notions that a group of people have about the nature of man, of the world,
and of man’s life in the world. Folk ideas would not constitute a genre of
folklore but rather would be expressed in a great variety of genres” (1972, 95).
Clearly, as his title indicates, Dundes is searching for a unit of analysis but is
also implying that these “folk ideas” are recognizable, autonomous entities,
each with a history of its own. They may or may not depend on narratives,
on myths, for their most potent means of expression. And any given folk idea
may be summarized in a single word (for example, “individualism”) or a
sentence (“Science can solve any problem”) or phrase (“the principle of
unlimited good”).
Not all ideas routinely called “myth” by media writers would be “folk ideas,”
and not all folk ideas would find their way into the stories folklorists call myths.
However, collectively, the folk ideas that are taken up and given expression
through popular self-help books may well function as does myth—to allow
for the expression and evolution of a significant set of beliefs. In 1926, noted
anthropologist Bronislaw Malinowski wrote the following observations on
myth in his Myth in Primitive Psychology:
Myth fulfills in primitive culture an indispensable function: it expresses,
enhances, and codifies belief; it safeguards and enforces morality; it vouches for
the efficiency of ritual and contains practical rules for the guidance of man.
Myth is thus a vital ingredient of human civilization; it is not an idle tale, but a
hard-worked active force; it is not an intellectual explanation or an artistic
imagery, but a pragmatic charter of primitive faith and moral wisdom. ([1926]
1954, 101)
The role of myth as pragmatic charter of faith and wisdom is easily seen in
the penchant of self-help book writers for examining folk ideas.
Yet as Dundes warned us, folk ideas are not easily identified. They do not
have a single form, style, or genre. A folk idea must be recognized purely on
the basis of content. And that person doing the “recognizing” cannot sim-
ply surmise that a given notion is a folk idea; the classifier must also be able
to demonstrate that the idea is traditional, that it has a “history” of trans-
mission through time and space. The process is similar to that of identify-
ing “cultural patterns” or, more recently, “memes” in culture and perhaps
even themes in works of literature or music. In fact, the well-worn term
“theme” often used in literary studies is probably most appropriate to our
study of self-help books since they are a genre of literature. But the process
of transmission more closely follows that of folk motifs in oral literature.
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Memes, Themes, and Worldview 95
Many of the same concerns that folklorists have brought to their study of
folktales have reemerged in the “new science of memes.” Aaron Lynch, in his
book Thought Contagion, offers the following observations:
Like a software virus in a computer network or a physical virus in a city, thought
contagions proliferate by effectively “programming” for their own retransmis-
sion. Beliefs affect retransmission in so many ways that they set off a colorful,
unplanned growth race among diverse “epidemics” of ideas. Actively contagious
ideas are now called memes . . . by students of the newly emerging science of
memetics. (1996, 2)
One thing that is clear in Lynch’s choice of words (and in the language of
other writers on the topic as well) is the sense of human inadequacy in the
face of this challenge by a hostile, invading force. Memes, according to the
theory, take on a life of their own and simply “use” people as a means of trans-
mission.
It is instructive, I think, to remember the words that Mihaly Csikszentmi-
halyi used in writing of the historical path of memes: “Once a meme is well-
established, it tends to generate inertia in the mind, and forces us to pursue
its logical consequences to the bitter end” (1993, 124). It may seem surpris-
ing that researchers would adopt so easily such a pessimistic perspective,
viewing people as rather spineless creatures willing and eager to do the bid-
ding of powerful ideas. Certainly we do have the evidence of the Holocaust
in World War II and even more recent genocides to point to. Still, the fear
that that is the direction all humans will go when taken on by a hostile meme
is itself a belief. And interestingly, it is the rhetoric-based community of self-
help book authors rather than theoretical scholars that has relentlessly chal-
lenged that belief.
Let me return briefly to the process of transmission as studied by folklor-
ists, for it is in that early study of folk narrative that we can see the most tell-
ing parallel to how researchers understand the process of “handing on” and
changing established ideas. One of the clearest discussions of the “automi-
gration” problem in folktale study was offered by Linda Dégh and Andrew
Vázsonyi in their 1975 article, “The Hypothesis of Multi-Conduit Transmis-
sion in Folklore.” As Dégh and Vázsonyi point out, the question of the trans-
mission of intangible ideas—in this case, the plots of folktales—was already
an issue when the Grimm Brothers published their famous collection of
Kinder- und Hausmärchern in 1812.
But it was not until early in the next century that significant theoretical
discussion focused on the process and the “thing”—in this case, the folktale
“type” or plot—that was being spread, supposedly through some superor-
ganic mechanism that simply used humans as vehicles of transmission. Thus
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96 self-help books
it was postulated that a fairy tale plot such as “Cinderella” could move about
as “the wave rings on water” or as an independent and steady stream. Chal-
lenges to this theory took the form of reminders that real individuals are the
tellers and real people are the audiences for stories and that proper study of
the process requires observation of the natural context in which stories are
told. Dégh and Vázsonyi were still cautious about the conclusions one could
make, but they argued that “we can safely say that investigations neither jus-
tify the contention that oral transmission inundates like a stream covering
everything, nor support the thesis that the once-established ‘perfect’ form
of tradition is perpetuated merely by multiple and manifold reinforcement”
(1975, 211).
In effect, folklorists battled the too-ready acceptance of the metaphor of
the meme a long time ago. I point this out again only to emphasize how very
seductive that metaphor is; it tempts us to see only that an idea marches re-
lentlessly to “its bitter end.” We lose sight of our own role as individuals who
choose what we will do with an idea. Nevertheless, recognizing the meme or
the theme or the folk idea as a real and powerful idea is important, is essen-
tial, if we are to choose wisely. If we see clearly what would likely happen if
we continue to follow a path that leads toward a “bitter end,” perhaps we can
individually and collectively choose not to follow that path, even though it
might offer us a personal or political advantage right now. That is the mes-
sage of self-help book writers. And because awareness of the possible bitter
end is so important, we must, they would argue, be very careful in identify-
ing what the problem is before we consider how to solve it.
Cultural Ambiguity
We have seen that there is a process that allows folk ideas to emerge and evolve
and become a part of the worldview of a culture. As we might guess, given
his suggestion of a term for analysis of worldview, Alan Dundes has spent
much of his career identifying folk ideas, establishing their longevity and
pervasiveness, and assessing their effect on the rest of culture. And he has
named some folk ideas as particularly characteristic of American culture: an
orientation toward the future; a tendency to value and trust vision over oth-
er senses; an active bias favoring males over females; even a need to think and
group things or ideas in threes (see Dundes, 1980).
Other researchers have identified various cultural patterns that fall easily
into the category of folk ideas. Richard M. Dorson names four “impulses”
that characterize each of four periods in American history (America in Leg-
end [1973]); Edward C. Stewart and Milton J. Bennett discuss a number of
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behavior patterns characteristic of Americans, such as pragmatism, compe-

tition, an orientation to action, informality, materialism, and individualism
(American Cultural Patterns: A Cross-Cultural Perspective [1991]); and Rob-
ert Bellah and his colleagues have addressed at length the conflict between
individualism and commitment to community (Habits of the Heart). These
and other works speak directly to the assumption that there are accepted
beliefs or ideas that are so pervasive in American culture as to be character-
istic of the culture as a whole.
Still, it is clear that while one can identify customary ways of thinking,
individuals in contemporary America are bombarded with many conflict-
ing ideas. America is not a homogeneous culture, even if there is a majority
whose ideas on what is right and good seem to dominate. People are acquaint-
ed with many points of view. As Kenneth J. Gergen writes: “Beliefs in the true
and the good depend on a reliable and homogeneous group of supporters,
who define what is reliably ‘there,’ plain and simple. With social saturation,
the coherent circles of accord are demolished, and all beliefs thrown into
question by one’s exposure to multiple points of view” (1991, xi). In contem-
porary American culture, there is a tendency for ideas to exist in a constant
state of opposition or conflict, even when one side of the conflict seems to
be stronger than the other.
This incidence of opposition between folk ideas is not unique to Ameri-
can culture, however, or even to the modern period. Perhaps no other writ-
er has had a more profound impact on contemporary thinking about the
construction of cultural ideas than Claude Lévi-Strauss, and he was adamant
about the universality of mythological thinking. In “The Structural Study of
Myth,” he says, “Some claim that human societies merely express, through
their mythology, fundamental feelings common to the whole of mankind,
such as love, hate, revenge” (1972, 170). He contends that it is not so simple
as that; he goes on to say that “the kind of logic which is used by mythical
thought is as rigorous as that of modern science” (194). And that logic al-
ways involves the mediation of opposites. In other words, mythical thinking
requires that folk ideas be both traditional and opposed, usually in a fairly
complicated and richly creative way.
Where does this take us in our discussion of self-help books? First, we can
agree to think of self-help books collectively as a cumulative expression of
mythical thinking in contemporary American culture, much as Lévi-Strauss
was willing to include Freud’s use of the Oedipus story as part of the cumu-
lative cultural material comprising the Oedipus myth. Though the books are
written rather than passed along orally, the work of individuals rather than
tribal property, and, for the most part, expository rather than narrative, we
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98 self-help books
can still acknowledge their functioning as vehicles for mythical thinking. And,
we can assume that there will be identifiable units—folk ideas—that we can,
with effort, name and corroborate as existing in American culture and rec-
ognize when we encounter them in self-help books. Finally, we can antici-
pate at every turn a mediation of opposites, or, in fact, an ambiguity in the
culture about which folk idea is right and good—a disagreement about how
we are to feel about the ideas our culture has provided.
This cultural ambiguity is precisely what engages self-help book writers.
They are eager to offer their interpretations, and those interpretations will
always require a consideration of their opposites, of the “old” point of view.
At a more popular level, they are doing what Alan Dundes determined to do
in his book Interpreting Folklore: to discover patterns of culture and thus “pro-
vide the means of raising levels of consciousness” (1980, x). And, the self-help
book writers usually go beyond this exercise in consciousness-raising and
suggest expansions and applications that make this awareness of folk ideas
more directly relevant to the lives of their readers. They offer New Age answers
to the cultural ambiguity that accompanies these highlighted folk ideas.
Themes of the New Age

It should be clear that the topics of self-help literature are not necessarily the
same thing as the folk ideas addressed by self-help writers. For example, in
Santrock, Minnett, and Campbell’s Authoritative Guide to Self-Help Books,
only a few of the thirty-two topics listed in the table of contents represent
actual belief-based practices or attitudes that the authors hope to challenge
with opposing ideational rhetoric—topics such as anger, anxiety, codepen-
dency, or depression. A few topics do represent the New Age themes the self-
help books are particularly noted for addressing—understanding death and
dying, finding love and intimacy, raising self-esteem, and improving motiva-
tion. But in general, the folk ideas central to the didactic purpose of self-help
books are to be found embedded in the texts themselves, much as Dundes
proclaimed folk ideas to be scattered and often camouflaged within the var-
ious genres of folklore.
More telling are the titles of many of the self-help books themselves (Pos-
itive Solitude [André, 1991]; Stop Being Mean to Yourself [Beattie, 1997]; Mind-
ing the Body, Mending the Mind [Borysenko]; Feel the Fear and Do It Anyway
[Jeffers]) or their subtitles (How to Transform Your Life by Telling the Truth
[Blanton, 1994]; When Being in Control Gets Out of Control [Mallinger and
DeWyze, 1992]; Getting Out of Your Own Way [Sills, 1993]; Creating Trust,
Luck, and Joy [Sinetar]). Ultimately, as with the paradigmatic structures Lévi-
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Strauss identified in myths, the themes developed and challenged by self-help

books are in the eye of the beholder. The few writers or editors who have
directly addressed the self-help book phenomenon as a topic of research have
helped identify several themes.
Gary Greenberg, in The Self on the Shelf, for example, focuses exclusively
on the theme of codependency—in this case, an “old” belief or behavior
pattern that the many relevant self-help books hope to replace with a more
effective philosophy. Greenberg is quick to point out the problems in the
“new” ideas offered by the self-help writers; he acknowledges the continu-
ing ambiguity of the culture. Most self-help book writers themselves are less
inclined to recognize the need for mediation between the old and the new.
A more recent study by Elizabeth Lesser, The New American Spirituality: A
Seeker’s Guide (1999), is clearly supportive of the folk ideas promoted by the
spiritual self-help books she reviews for her readers. She incorporates the
themes she identifies into her own story of spiritual renewal, much more in
the way that Lévi-Strauss would envision a myth emerging in an individu-
al’s telling. The sense of mediation of opposites is left, in this case, up to the
reader.
Perhaps more helpful to our purpose here—identifying some of the pri-
mary folk ideas or themes at the heart of the self-help movement—is a book
produced by Ronald S. Miller and the editors of New Age Journal. The book,
As Above, So Below (1992), is published by one of the noted New Age pub-
lishers, Jeremy P. Tarcher of Los Angeles, and it includes as subtitles for each
of its chapters phrases that, to my mind, identify the folk ideas Miller and
the editors recognize as central to the New Age movement (and thus certainly
a significant part of the self-help tradition). Often immediately apparent in
the combination of chapter title and subtitle is that declaration of opposites
so essential in mythical thinking. For example, chapter 1 is titled “The Emerg-
ing Spirituality,” and its subtitle is “Falling in Love with Our World.” Implied
in the word “emerging” in the title is the suggestion that previously—before
the new spirituality began to emerge—people were not “in love with our
world.” Or again, in chapter 12, the title is “Awakening Creativity,” and the
subtitle is “Liberating the Inner Artist.” That creativity or artistry needs to
be awakened or liberated again suggests that the old folk idea restrained such
expression.
In writing 50 Self-Help Classics, Tom Butler-Bowdon groups books into six
general themes: The Power of Thought (change your thoughts, change your
life), Following Your Dream (achievement and goal-setting), Secrets of Hap-
piness (doing what you love, doing what works), The Bigger Picture (keep-
ing it in perspective), Soul and Mystery (appreciating your depth), and Mak-
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100 self-help books
ing a Difference (transforming yourself, transforming the world). The sub-

titles, again, reveal the points of challenge and ambiguity. If to be happy, one
must start “doing what you love,” then clearly an older and contrasting be-
lief is that to be happy, one must be dutiful or moral or obedient. While the
writers are not ambiguous about which beliefs are right, the culture is. The
themes that are central to self-help literature reflect the ambiguity of conflict-
ing beliefs.
My own articulation of the themes I see most clearly is influenced to some
extent by my adherence to the notion of syncretism in folklore and anthro-
pological research. “Syncretism” is a term used to identify the blending or rec-
onciliation of differing beliefs systems. Usually the term has been used when
the blend has been more obvious, as when belief in a fertility goddess is re-
placed with adoration of the Virgin Mary. In this instance, I view the emer-
gence of New Age themes in self-help books as an accommodation of and re-
sponse to folk ideas that have long been a part of American worldview but have
been increasingly brought into question and held in a state of ambiguity. Self-
help books make that ambiguity—that conflict of beliefs—apparent.
The writers of self-help books themselves are more often eager to challenge
the old and promote the new. It is the reader’s responsibility to reconcile the
differing beliefs in his or her own evolving philosophy. Robert Wuthnow, in
After Heaven: Spirituality in America since the 1950s (1998), suggests that in
recent decades, people have adopted a “spirituality of seeking”—one that
emphasizes negotiation rather than the security of a settled and shared be-
lief system and worldview. Even with regard to more secular themes, people
choose to seek out a variety of perspectives and reconcile the old and the new
beliefs in their everyday behaviors. Writers of self-help books feed this prac-
tice of negotiation by presenting arguments that invoke the dominant folk
ideas, only to challenge them and offer their opposites.
In keeping with their role as problem-namers and problem-solvers, self-
help book writers address a number of concerns individuals are likely to
themselves identify as their own problem. Readers often pick up a self-help
book specifically because it is about their self-identified problem with inse-
curity, timidity, guilt, worry, shyness, underachievement, rigidity, lack of cre-
ativity, lack of intimacy, a sense of failure, fear of death, depression, or sim-
ple lack of faith in much of anything. Others look for even more specific
problem areas: inadequacy in parenting, overeating, poor health, poor per-
formance on the job, and especially poor performance or lack of satisfaction
with regard to sexuality and personal interactions. Simply listing these con-
cerns does not really bring these issues into the arena of mythical thought.
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We can do this more effectively by returning to the framework of folk ideas

presented in opposition—the framework of cultural ambiguity.
While recognizing the many specific concerns viewed as problems by both
writers and readers of self-help books, I am going to suggest here that there
are eight “mythic” themes, themes that are in conflict in American culture
and to which self-help writers have offered and promoted the “new” perspec-
tive along with challenging the old. In effect, these are eight themes that are
intended to evoke a mythical, or mediating, response from the reader, a re-
sponse of informed choice, an enlightened and personally negotiated re-
sponse. And I would argue that, despite the energetic efforts of self-help book
writers, each of these themes will remain ambiguous in American culture—
though for those of their readers who are persuaded by their rhetoric and
examples, personal philosophies may well change to accept the new and chal-
lenging side of the folk idea.
The eight themes can be presented as single-word concepts: (1) fear; (2)
control; (3) competition; (4) judgment; (5) dishonesty; (6) individualism; (7)
violence; (8) impatience. It may seem that culture gives us a clear attitude to
bring to each of these. In American culture, competition and individualism
are good; dishonesty and violence are bad. Generally, we would argue, con-
trol and judgment are good; fear and impatience are bad. However, in fact,
there is an ambiguity tied to each of these. Fear is bad if it produces coward-
ice but good if it produces obedience to God or a law of nature. Control is
good if it leads to effective work but bad if it stifles innovation. Competition
is essential in a capitalist system, but it just might not be so good if it leads to
suicide or war. Our system of justice requires that all citizens be prepared to
judge their peers; on the other hand, the Bible teaches us to “judge not, that
ye be not judged.” Everyone knows that dishonesty is bad—even a very young
George Washington could not tell a lie—but then there are times when the
truth must not be spoken (Are you hiding Jewish war-victims in your attic?).
Individualism is the backbone of American culture, yet Robert Bellah and his
colleagues in Habits of the Heart point to its many negative effects, including
the loss of a sense of community. Violence is awful, of course, but we resort
to it time and again, thus reinforcing its real value. And impatience is if noth-
ing else bad practice—“All things come to those who wait”—and yet our
culture is strongly geared toward action, speed, and being first in line.
Most of the concerns that self-help writers address can be grouped under
one of these eight themes. In fact, a number of writers suggest that all con-
cerns or problems are a result of the first theme—fear, that eliminating fear
or at least learning to respond more appropriately to it is the one answer to
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all questions posed by self-help books. Ivan Hoffman writes, “Happiness,

loving, caring, feeling about a situation in a positive manner, looking at the
world without fear are all about the same thing” (1993, 69). Susan Jeffers, in
her book Feel the Fear and Do It Anyway, says, “The fear will never go away
as long as I continue to grow.” But she adds, “Pushing through the fear is less
frightening than living with the underlying fear that comes from a feeling of
helplessness” (1987, 30). In other words, pushing through the fear (eliminat-
ing it) is what is needed in the end.
James Kitchens brings a number of the themes together in one summary
comment on this common process of coming under the spell of a fear-in-
spired set of folk ideas:
As we grow older, we lose our souls. We learn about failure and disapproval
and rejection, and we begin to fear. We risk less, and our natural creativity is
swallowed up in our worry about inadequacy. We become careful and control-
ling as we compare ourselves to others, evaluate and grade ourselves, and com-
pete in order to avoid being perceived as a failure. Caution and suspicion re-
place trust and openness. We live in order to collect things and achievements,
which become badges we wear. We hope to prove to ourselves and to anyone
else who might be looking that we are not losers. We forfeit ourselves, and life
becomes hard. (1994, 20)
This dismal litany evokes the dominant folk ideas very clearly, if completely
negatively. No quarter is granted to the idea that sometimes fear is good, that
sometimes competition produces desired results, that the meme of judicious
control leads to progress. All that this writer sees is the “bitter end” to which
such a fear-based belief system leads.
We must remember that it is the self-help writers’ task to identify the prob-
lematic “old” beliefs and promote the opposite and “better” new beliefs they
would hope their readers will come to espouse. Kitchens, in his review above
of the fear and control, competition and judgment that make life hard, of-
fers essentially one folk idea in contrast and as a solution. He calls his solu-
tion “joy”; he subtitles his book Rediscovering the Joy and Meaning in Your
Life. But he goes on to say that “joy is a way of proceeding” (1994, 39), and
his description of that process is in fact the “folk idea” he hopes to promote:
the process of eliminating fear, refraining from judgment, and loosening
control brings joy, and we realize joy only by learning to trust—trust our-
selves, trust the universe, trust God—and accept life.
Most of the writers who address the problem of fear in any of its guises—
timidity, insecurity, fear of death, fear of failure, a sense of inadequacy, doubt
and disbelief—offer as a contrast and solution the idea of learning to trust
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the universe and accept life as it is. The folk idea asserts that life can be
trusted—not necessarily that things will go as one might wish or that there
will be no suffering, but rather that there is nothing to fear. In the larger per-
spective, life will provide what is needed, and what is given can be accepted
as right and good.
A perhaps not-so-subtle corollary here is the idea of the soul, the idea that
what is of ultimate concern is not the fate of the body but rather the fate of
what we identify as a “self.” Some writers do not identify this “self” as an
eternal soul but rather as a kind of psychological self-referential entity; how-
ever, a large number of writers do in fact write of the soul as a preexisting,
death-surviving reality. Interestingly, in either case, the assertion is made that
one must learn to trust that the “self” is safe, that the self cannot be harmed
by life. Like Alexander Pope in the eighteenth century, self-help book writ-
ers assure us that “whatever is, is right.” On the other hand, a fairly large
number of “spiritual” writers (as distinguished from popular psychology
writers) do also address the question of God or life after death, or both. But,
again, the folk idea involved is less one of describing or even recognizing
“God” and more a matter of general faith in the proposition that the uni-
verse is not to be feared but rather accepted.
This folk idea of trust is also offered, perhaps more indirectly, by writers
addressing the issue of too much control or the perceived need to evaluate
and judge. For example, in their book Too Perfect: When Being in Control Gets
Out of Control, Allan E. Mallinger and Jeannette DeWyze draw a picture of
the obsessive individual as someone who maintains a “myth of control”:
They come to believe that, through control of themselves and their personal
universe, they can protect themselves against the dangers in life, both real and
imagined. If they could articulate the myth that motivates their behavior, they
might say: “If I try hard enough, I can stay in control of myself, of others, and
of all the impersonal dangers of life (injury, illness, death, etc.). In this way I can
be certain of safe passage.” (1992, 15)
And while the authors offer some very specific suggestions of how to over-
come the compulsive behavior associated with this kind of thinking, in gen-
eral their message is tied to the larger idea of learning that control is ultimately
not in our hands, that we must trust life rather than try to control it.
Similarly, the “issues” of judgment, prejudice, even dishonesty itself are
seen as responses to the problem of fear, or the lack of trust. Often, the self-
help book writers remind us, we prejudge people because we fear that if we
don’t, they will take advantage of us in some way. We are convinced that we
need to be in control; we do not trust that we are safe in situations in which
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we must deal with people who are different from us. We may manipulate
people or even lie directly when we fear that simply trusting the universe will
not work to our advantage. Americans tend to applaud “street smarts,” and
openness is often seen as naïveté. Even in our most intimate relationships,
deception is often the choice we make. As Harriet Goldhor Lerner says, “The
human capacity to hide the real and display the false is truly extraordinary,
allowing us to regulate relationships through highly complex choices about
how we present ourselves to others” (1993, 118).
Lerner goes on to echo the observation of many self-help writers: “Trust
evolves only from a true knowledge of our partner and ourselves and a mu-
tual commitment to increasing levels of sharing and self-disclosure” (170).
In other words, what we call trust in an intimate relationship develops only
when the fear of self-disclosure is abandoned, when we no longer fear being
honest rather than cagey. For many of the self-help writers, the contrast be-
tween fear and trust, between dishonesty and trust, soon pulls into its do-
main a related worry over what happens when trust is absent—competition,
self-centeredness, and isolation, and even violence. As I mentioned earlier,
these ideas are often celebrated or at least consciously tolerated in American
culture. “It’s lonely at the top” is often seen as the price of competition and
individualism, but Americans are loath to give up any hard-won victories on
behalf of the rights of the individual.
The answering folk idea that many self-help writers offer in response to
these very ambiguous cultural icons of competition, individualism, and vio-
lence is an assertion that the universe and all in it are one. In particular, many
writers argue that there is a unity among all people, among all living beings,
and that awareness of that unity will restrain the individual from the imbal-
ances of aggressive competition, arrogance and self-centeredness, and vio-
lence. There are, however, surprisingly few practical suggestions offered for
how to implement this folk idea in daily life. Those who seem most easily able
to make such suggestions are writers who adopt from the very start an East-
ern rather than Western stance. Ram Dass (previously Richard Alpert), not-
ed counterculture figure of the 1960s, for example, took from his long immer-
sion in teachings of India a new sense of how to respond to the “separateness”
so characteristic of America. In Compassion in Action, reporting on his work
with AIDS victims, he speaks very directly to the problem of how fear com-
pels us to remain separate and also how we can overcome it:
When people are dying they often feel alone in their pain and fear. Those around
them are not going through what they are, so how could they understand? It takes
a lover who is not afraid of the pain to be present and wipe away the loneliness.
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For over twenty-five years I have been often in the company of dying peo-
ple. In the course of all those moments I have come to see just how in love I
can stay with other beings in the face of their suffering. If I am afraid of pain,
then in a subtle and sometimes not-so-subtle way I distance my heart from the
dying person with whom I am sitting. If I am afraid of dying, then the very dying
process of another awakens my fear and inevitably I push that person away so
I can remain safe in my own “not dying” illusion. (80–81)
He goes on to speak of the disturbing experience of recognizing that he is

distancing himself from the dying patient. He speaks of coming to grips with
his own failure to be open and then describes the process of moving from
this distancing to a sense of compassion: “I go deeper within myself, far be-
hind my identification and fears, back into awareness, mindful of our pre-
dicament but no longer lost in it. The humanity is there, but so, too, is the
spacious awareness. I have come into love, and I feel the barriers between me
and this other being dissolve” (81).
When self-help books treat the question of unity, often apparent is some
confusion of individuality and separation with the notion of subjectivity.
Again, the message or folk idea that New Age writers are sending is one that
advocates cutting through subjectivity to see that people are all “the same”
under the skin, all a precious expression of life—even, as Neale Donald
Walsch tells us in Conversations with God: Book 1, an incarnation of the
divine—and all, therefore, worthy of our love. Some of this confusion is
apparent in Barbara Sher’s book It’s Only Too Late If You Don’t Start Now.
In discussing romantic love, she offers the following very effective “exer-
cise” for understanding how self-centeredness clouds the ability to love
people in the more general sense:
To experience real love is to understand that a unique creature, separate and
different from you, is standing in front of you. When you can see another hu-
man that way, you can’t help loving him. To do that, however, you need a sta-
ble identity, a sense of knowing who you are, and no desperation in your heart.
. . . You can get a very brief glimpse of what I mean if you try this experiment.
Sometime when you’re out in the world, take a look at an ordinary stranger: a
bus driver, or someone sitting near you on a train or in a restaurant. Spend a
few seconds looking at him. Then imagine you just got a message from the
future and found out he was going to die the next day.
Suddenly that person looks different. In an instant his value becomes clear
to you and you see how unusual and unique he is. It’s only a trick you’ve played
on your senses, but it gives you an idea of how miraculous people will look to
you one day, once you’ve learned how to see without the fog of self-interest.
That’s love. The real thing. To see someone else clearly, not to look into the
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106 self-help books
mirror of your own desire or to dress up the beloved with the scrim of your
favorite fantasy, or to reinvent him for your own uses. (1998, 130–31)
Here, seeing the other as a separate being seems to be a goal rather than an
obstacle, and yet despite the language used, we are still being coached to see
the unity of all persons and to not, in this case, let our subjectivity deny that
unity and instead substitute a mirror image. We need to escape our own is-
land of perception and see that we are not the only real person in the uni-
verse. Or, as Jon Kabat-Zinn says in his book Wherever You Go, There You Are,
“One practical way to do this is to look at other people and ask yourself if
you are really seeing them or just your thoughts about them” (1994, 26).
Ideally, one of the significant contributions that the fields of anthropology
and folklore make to the world is in their promotion of the concept of unity
in the midst of diversity. In general, self-help writers are looking not so much
at unity in the face of cultural differences as at an awareness of unity in the face
of a philosophy of separatism. Even intimate partners who share many aspects
of culture may feel a sense of alienation, competition, self-centeredness, a need
to withhold or deceive, shame or arrogance, and even violence that comes from
seeing each other as entirely separate. Self-help writers are eager to offer a phi-
losophy that ties all human beings together, and yet they find it difficult to
suggest practical applications of that idea. Perhaps that is why James Redfield
felt it necessary to offer his insights in the form of a fictional story. In his sec-
ond parable, The Tenth Insight, he has one of his characters, Wil, respond to
the narrator’s question “Aren’t some people just inherently bad?” with the
following comment:
No, they just go crazy in the Fear and make horrible mistakes. And, ultimately,
they must bear the full responsibility of these mistakes. But what has to be
understood is that horrible acts are caused, in part, by our very tendency to as-
sume that some people are naturally evil. That’s the mistaken view that fuels
the polarization. Both sides can’t believe humans can act the way they do with-
out being intrinsically no good, and so they increasingly dehumanize and alien-
ate each other, which increases the Fear and brings out the worst in everyone.
(1996, 134)
And later the same character adds: “We know that no matter how undesir-
able the behavior of others is, we have to grasp that they are just souls at-
tempting to wake up, like us” (149).
One surprising application of this awareness of unity is in Peter Senge’s
popular business handbook, The Fifth Discipline. Among his many other
insights, Senge observes that “systems thinking” eliminates the need for cast-
ing others as villains.
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In mastering systems thinking, we give up the assumption that there must be
an individual, or individual agent, responsible. The feedback perspective sug-
gests that everyone shares responsibility for problems generated by a system. That
doesn’t necessarily imply that everyone involved can exert equal leverage in
changing the system. But it does imply that the search for scapegoats—a par-
ticularly alluring pastime in individualistic cultures such as ours in the United
States—is a blind alley. (1990, 78–79, emphasis in original)
In effect, Senge’s practical advice presupposes a philosophy or folk idea that

views all individuals as interdependent, as equally tied to the system that
sustains their interactions. From Redfield’s rather mystical notion of unity
to Senge’s pragmatic one, there is a New Age reinforcement of the idea of
unity and an awareness of its importance in overcoming self-centeredness.
It represents a shift in awareness similar, Senge argues, to that “so ardently
advocated by ecologists in their cries that we see ourselves as part of nature,
not separate from nature” (78). It is the second major folk idea advanced by
the writers of self-help books.
The third folk idea is tied to the previous two but includes the dimension
of time in a new way. In his book Soul Search, David Darling quotes Albert
Einstein to summarize the new philosophy to which Einstein was so clearly
a contributor.
A human being is part of the whole, called by us “Universe”; a part limited
in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings as some-
thing separated from the rest—a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness.
The delusion is a prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to
affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from
this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures
and the whole of nature in its beauty. Nobody is able to achieve this complete-
ly but the striving for such achievement is, in itself, a part of the liberation and
a foundation for inner security. (1995, 134–35)
Einstein saw time as part of the prison that confines people to a sense of sep-
aration and a mistrust of the universe. He does not offer suggestions one
might follow to achieve release from this “prison” of time, but of course our
self-help book writers do.
The most famous articulation of the contrasting folk idea to the confin-
ing awareness of time is Ram Dass’s classic statement in his 1971 book Be Here
Now. In The New American Spirituality, Elizabeth Lesser writes of a meeting
between Ram Dass and Indian-English spiritualist Pir Vilayat Kahn:
At one of Omega’s first programs Ram Dass joined Pir Vilayat and other
spiritual teachers to lead a meditation retreat. I recall a conversation around
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108 self-help books
the dinner table between Ram Dass and Pir Vilayat that I call the “to be here
now or not to be here now” debate. In his erudite British accent, Pir Vilayat
wondered aloud why anyone would want to only “be here now.”
“There are so many glorious planes of existence. The angelic realms are re-
freshingly different from the one here, and they are available to us at all times,”
he argued. “Why not leave here, and go there? That’s what meditation is for.”
“That’s not why I meditate,” said Ram Dass.
“Well, I meditate to transcend the experiences of pain and separation of the
here and now. Why remain in our stale, fossilized state of being, when we could
dance in cosmic ecstasy?”
Ram Dass, always ready with an answer, said, “Pain and separation occur
when we regret the past or worry about the future. Here and now is ecstasy. And
about those ‘glorious planes of existence’? Those ‘angelic realms’? I’m afraid
I’m not familiar with them.” (1999, 95)
As Ram Dass suggests, problems such as guilt, worry, pain, alienation, and
perhaps even anger and depression may reflect our inability to “be here now.”
I would see this third New Age folk idea as contrasting with the eighth theme
above—impatience. In some ways this theme is second only to individual-
ism as “the” mythic theme of American culture. Like individualism, impa-
tience is viewed with great ambivalence by Americans. Certainly we do not
want to be forever worrying or feeling guilty or harried by the future. We do
not want to be forever hurdling, as James Kitchens says—forever jumping
one hurdle after another, always focusing on the next (1994, 39). And yet even
many self-help writers speak of the need to control time. Often lack of cre-
ativity or underachievement or dissatisfaction on the job is linked to the
mismanagement of time.
It might seem that a writer such as Alan Lakein in his book How to Get
Control of Your Time and Your Life is advocating, if not outright impatience,
at least an overseer’s manipulation of this quantity—time. But even Lakein,
after speaking of ways to better use the time we have, suggests something very
like the notion of “be here now”:
I think you will find that if you arrange things so that you find time to relax
and “do nothing,” you will get more done and have more fun doing it.
One client, an aerospace engineer, didn’t know how to “do nothing.” Ev-
ery minute of his leisure time was scheduled with intense activity. He had an
outdoor-activities schedule in which he switched from skiing and ice hock-
ey to water-skiing and tennis. His girlfriend kept up with him in these activ-
ities, although she would have preferred just to sit by the fire and relax once
in a while. Like too many people, he felt the need to be doing something all
the time—doing nothing seemed a waste of time. His “relaxing by the fire”
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consisted of playing chess, reading Scientific American, or playing bridge. Even
his lovemaking was on a tight schedule.
For an experiment I asked him to “waste” his time for five minutes during
one of our sessions together. What he ended up doing was relaxing, sitting
quietly and daydreaming. When he was finally able to admit that emotional
reasons caused him to reject relaxing as a waste of time, he began to look more
critically at that assumption. Once he accepted the fact that relaxing was a good
use of time, he became less compulsive about being busy and started enjoying
each activity more. (1973, 53)
Lakein’s “relaxing” may seem a far cry from the deep, meditative experi-
ence of “being” that Ram Dass and other New Age writers advocate. And yet
the experience of “be here now” is pretty much whatever one makes of it. It
is the one folk idea that is entirely subjective. Jon Kabat-Zinn begins one of
his chapters with the following description of a New Yorker cartoon: “Two
Zen monks in robes and shaved heads, one young, one old, sitting side by
side cross-legged on the floor. The younger one is looking somewhat quiz-
zically at the other one, who is turned toward him and saying: ‘Nothing hap-
pens next. This is it’” (1994, 14). Kabat-Zinn goes on to say that meditation
is not a “doing” but rather a “being.” And this “being” allows us “to let go
of the past and the future and wake up to what we are now, in this moment.”
And washed away as well in this experience of “being here now” are many
of the physical ills associated with stress and anger and, of course, that hall-
mark of “type A” personalities, impatience.
One of the more interesting developments of the “be here now” idea is the
expansion of the general principle of engagement or “mindfulness” into what
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi calls “flow.” In his book Finding Flow: The Psychol-
ogy of Engagement with Everyday Life, Csikszentmihalyi writes of the “auto-
telic” personality. Here are some of his observations:
Applied to personality, autotelic denotes an individual who generally does
things for their own sake, rather than in order to achieve some later external
goal. . . . They are more autonomous and independent, because they cannot be
easily manipulated with threats or rewards from the outside. At the same time,
they are more involved with everything around them because they are fully
immersed in the current of life. . . .
If there is one quality that distinguishes autotelic individuals, it is that their
psychic energy seems inexhaustible. Even though they have no greater atten-
tional capacity than anyone else, they pay more attention to what happens
around them, they notice more, and they are willing to invest more attention
in things for their own sake without expecting an immediate return. Most of
us hoard attention carefully. . . . The result is that we don’t have much atten-
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110 self-help books
tion left over to participate in the world on its own terms, to be surprised, to
learn new things, to grow beyond the limits set by our self-centeredness. (1997,
117–18, 123)
Flow is not so much a state achieved through meditation as it is a strong sense

of engagement applied as consistently as possible throughout the day.
Studies prove that people in a “flow” state do not notice the passage of
time; they are too absorbed. As Ram Dass would have it, they are “being here
now.” Furthermore, there is no evaluative dimension to their experiences
until those experiences are over. People in a state of flow recognize their ex-
periences as “ecstatic” or “satisfying” or “peaceful” only afterward. Like a jazz
musician, they avoid self-consciousness lest they pull themselves out of the
“now” experience and break the frame of engagement. Flow is the difference
between the ecstasy of sex and the victory of conquest; it is the difference
between the high of creative performance and the pride of accomplishment,
the rapture of a religious swoon and the confession of awe and contrition. It
is the difference between the excitement of thinking and the congratulations
for impressive thought.
Csikszentmihalyi concludes his discussion of the process of finding flow
with a reflection on how being present, being “in flow,” can serve the good
of humanity:
The more psychic energy we invest in the future of life, the more we become a
part of it. Those who identify with evolution blend their consciousness with
it, like a tiny creek joining an immense river, whose currents become as one.
Hell in this scenario is simply the separation of the individual from the flow
of life. It is clinging to the past, to the self, to the safety of inertia. . . . Within
an evolutionary framework, we can focus consciousness on the tasks of every-
day life in the knowledge that when we act in the fullness of the flow experi-
ence, we are also building a bridge to the future of our universe. (147)
It is perhaps ironic that Csikszentmihalyi himself feels compelled to attach

a future goal to the “practice” of flow experiences in the everyday context.
The point, of course, is that these experiences happen for their own sake;
people are engaged not for a reason but for a fact.
Still, Finding Flow, for all its intellectual complexity and the erudition of
its author, is in effect a self-help book. The writer suggests certain practices
that will, if followed faithfully, lead to a life more replete with experiences of
flow and a more autotelic personality. The three “new” folk ideas of trust,
unity, and “be here now” come through in Csikszentmihalyi’s book as clearly
as in many of the other books written in response to the “old” themes of fear,
control, competition, judgment, dishonesty, individualism or separation,
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violence, and impatience. These are the aspects of worldview examined, chal-
lenged, and interpreted by the self-help book writers. These are the ideas that
are in the culture and used by self-help authors in what seems to be an en-
tirely acceptable “creative cultural plagiarism.” No one will fault even three
hundred self-help authors for all offering their readers the traditional advice
to “let go” and trust the universe.
In the next chapter, we shall look at how these same authors use narrative—
one of the most ancient and familiar of rhetorical devices—to persuade their
readers that these “new” folk ideas are more effective guides to the good life
than the old themes so pervasive in America’s worldview.
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6. Stories
Though self-help books are works of nonfiction and are cast, in general, into
what composition teachers would call “expository prose,” they very often use
stories by way of illustration. In fact, so common is this use of narrative that
many reviewers of popular psychology books raise the issue of stories, testi-
monials, or case studies as reason to mistrust the arguments presented through
such books altogether. Psychologist Keith E. Stanovich offers the following
observation:
Talk shows and paperback book racks are full of psychological theories based on
the clinical experience of the originator. Many of the therapies presented to the
public through these outlets are backed by nothing more than the testimonials
of individuals who have undergone them and considered themselves improved
or cured. . . . [W]e shall develop a principle of great use to consumers of psycho-
logical information: Case studies and testimonials are virtually worthless as evi-
dence for the evaluation of psychological theories and treatments. (1992, 55)
Not all self-help books address psychological issues, of course, but Stanovich’s
critique could likely apply in most cases anyway—if, as he assumed, the ob-
jective were to convince other researchers or even “consumers” of the valid-
ity of a theory or method of analysis.
To return to the didactic goal of the self-help book writer, we can see that
persuasion sufficient to inspire a reader’s own constructive action is the writ-
er’s objective; persuasion, rather than rigorous verification, is the writer’s
aim. And stories are very persuasive, despite their singularity, despite their
lack of comparative or control group instances. It is almost as though peo-
ple not bound by “professional standards of research” are more free to in-
dulge their innate appreciation for the universal truth of any story—or the
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universal fiction of all stories, including those claiming to be scientific ex-

planation. At issue for the scientist in any field is the level of consistency or
repetition considered necessary for scientific proof. At issue for the reader
of a self-help book is the level of familiar “good story” structure, drama, and
appropriateness the writer brings to the application. If the writer is success-
ful, the story included as illustration will attract and engage the reader and
just perhaps lead the reader to accept a new point of view. Writers know the
power of stories.
For Love of Drama

In A Chorus Line, the popular 1980s musical about American choreographer
Bob Fosse, one of the dancers sings the song “What I Did for Love.” Interest-
ingly, the song is not about an intimate relationship but rather about the sing-
er’s love for her work, her creative expression, her profession. The song itself
is a story, and like all stories, it illustrates our seemingly inescapable need for
drama. In effect, what we do for love—what we do to convince ourselves that
we are alive—is create drama, over and over again, story after story, every
moment of our lives. When it gets out of hand, we speak of people as “overly
dramatic,” but when drama is absent, we think of ourselves as dead, or at least
as bored, and we seek ways to put drama into our lives, sometimes by seeing
or creating problems where there are none, sometimes vicariously through
video games or television, or sadly, sometimes through violence or drugs.
But most often, we create for ourselves stories, narratives that help us “see”
the dramatic logic of what we are doing or have done or intend to do. Sto-
ries tie pieces of information together into a meaningful sequence, explana-
tion, or coincidence. These stories may range from a simple pattern such as
“In the past when the bell rang, I got food; when it rings again, I can expect
food” (even Pavlov’s dogs tell stories) to complex chains of cause and effect
or instances of synchronicity. At the Duke University Institute for Parapsy-
chology, for example, staff members record accounts of seeming coincidences
that their informants find significant, usually as proof of extrasensory per-
ception or precognition. Always the storytellers decide that their experiences
are so dramatic, so unusual, as to be worth telling the researchers at the in-
stitute. Richard S. Broughton, director of research at the institute, makes the
following comments:
While we all know people who seem inclined to impart mystical significance
to any two events that seem remotely connected, the fact is that most adults can
keep coincidence in reasonable perspective in their daily lives. The cases that
were volunteered to the Duke lab were given precisely because they seemed to
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exceed the threshold of chance. In general what makes the cases stand apart
from simple coincidences is the preciseness of the fit between the experience and
the event. (1991, 23, emphasis in original)
In other words, dramatic instances of synchronicity are worth telling, and

for the tellers at least, the stories are likely accepted as “proof” of some fact
of nature, such as the possibility of ESP, precognition, or life after death.
Again, as with Stanovich’s dismissal of clinical “cases” earlier, we might
view such stories as inadequate evidence for parapsychological realities. But
for self-help book writers, it is the dramatic success of the stories them-
selves—the preciseness of the fit—that makes them useful to their enterprise.
The stories make a good “case” because they are so dramatic, so well-con-
structed—almost too good to be true. In There Are No Accidents: Synchro-
nicity and the Stories of Our Lives, Robert H. Hopcke argues that stories that
relate meaningful coincidences are constructed from the teller’s own feelings,
that “our feelings are the mainspring of our stories, and it is our feelings that
drive the plot forward” (1997, 34). For Hopcke, it is the tellers’ own need to
find coherence in their lives that motivates them to understand their expe-
riences as though they were stories—as unusual, dramatic, and meaningful
events. And, as a self-help writer, he advises them to do exactly that—to see
dramatic concurrence in the events of their lives and to allow that sense of
synchronicity to lend to each life the “quality of a single, unified story” (213).
In effect, he encourages people to expect in their own lives the kind of coin-
cidences he presents as stories in his book. He uses stories to teach a lesson
in faith, personal vision, and self-esteem.
Besides creating our own stories, we listen to or read or watch other peo-
ple’s stories—anecdotes, novels, films. We learn to seek out narratives and
use them in formulating our response to life. Little wonder, then, that self-
help book writers rely so heavily on stories. Authors draw upon a great vari-
ety of sources for the stories they use in their books, and they make use of a
number of specific narrative genres that work particularly well as illustra-
tions or what medieval priests called “exempla”—stories that underscore a
point or lesson. While some of the stories self-help writers include or refer
to are short stories or are from novels or films, many are the circulating plots
of traditional stories or are the authors’ own newly created plots of personal
narratives or case studies. And self-help writers use these stories in a conven-
tional way, in a way teachers and mentors have used them for centuries: they
use them to reinforce a point; they use them rhetorically.
One entertaining yet telling metafolkloric record of the clear tie between
stories and moral lessons to be learned is the rise of the “shaggy dog story”
as a popular joke tradition. In such stories, there is usually a long, drawn-
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out narrative involving absurd characters doing absurd things. Finally, when
the listener’s patience with the nonsensical story is wearing thin, the story-
teller offers a “moral” in the form of a punning variation on a familiar say-
ing, such as “People who live in grass houses shouldn’t stow thrones.”1 The
joke patterns itself after (and parodies) the ancient fable, which also offers a
“moral” in which the person recounting the fable (Aesop, or later La Fon-
taine) suggests a suitable interpretation or application of the narrative in the
context of human affairs. The “shaggy dog story” simply keeps this didactic
genre alive in contemporary society, playfully reminding us that stories and
messages or “morals” have always been paired in our collective experience.
The appeal of stories and the need (or at least the opportunity) to interpret
them to specific moral or political ends have long been recognized by rhet-
oricians like Aesop who hope to sway their listeners (or readers) toward a
particular opinion or understanding of advisable behavior.
In a similar vein, Christianity justly celebrates Jesus as a master storytell-
er and teacher. Like modern self-help writers, Jesus knew the power of sto-
ries. Even people who have never set foot in a Sunday school classroom will
know the parable of the sower, the parable of the talents, or the story of the
prodigal son. Jesus’ effective use of parables very likely accounts for much
of his popularity in his own time. He was an educator, a rabbi, who knew how
well a story conveys what mere preaching cannot. And he appreciated the
appeal and memorable quality of stories; he was eager to enlist everyone’s
love of drama, of narrative, in his own mission to teach a new philosophy.
Parables are only one kind of story, but they are especially effective when used
in a teaching context, or in any context in which the storyteller hopes that a
particular message comes through. In a classic folklore study, Barbara Kirsh-
enblatt-Gimblett writes at length about the relationship between a specific
parable and a specific context in which it was told. In this case, the parable was
used by the storyteller (Dvora Katz) to comment indirectly on her brother’s
actions and to suggest how disappointing his behavior was to his children. The
brother had promised several times to take the children to a show but had been
too busy each time to carry through with his promise. Finally, one day when it
was late in the evening and the children were already engaged in other activi-
ties, he invited them to the show. Dvora told him that it reminded her of one
of their mother’s stories. Here is the story she tells:
A man once came to a rabbi to ask a shayle (question regarding ritual purity),
forgiveness.
He says, “What is it? What did you do?”
He says, “I didn’t wash . . . I didn’t say the prayer before the meal.”
He says, “How come?”
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He says, “Because I didn’t wash my hands.”
He says, “Well, why didn’t you wash your hands?”
He says, “Because I wasn’t eating Jewish food.”
He says, “How come you weren’t eating Jewish food?”
“Because I was eating in a Gentile restaurant.”
He says, “How come?”
“Because it was Yonkiper and the Jewish restaurants were closed.” (1975, 110)
Yom Kippur is the Jewish Day of Atonement, a most solemn fast day on
which every person’s fate for the coming year is to be decided. It becomes
apparent only at the end of the story how gravely inappropriate the man’s
action was. He made much of not praying or washing his hands when in truth
his greatest offense was that he had gone to eat in a Gentile restaurant when
he should have been observing a most holy day of fasting and repentance. The
storyteller herself makes the connection between the story and the “frame”
of the real situation (in which her brother protests that his children are un-
grateful when he finally says he will take them to the show), and she reports
both pieces as yet another story—about how she smoothed out a tense situ-
ation with a humorous yet pertinent story. She was well aware of both the
power and the appeal of the story and its appropriateness to the context.
Parables are a special genre of narrative, rather like fables. They are sim-
ple yet puzzlelike tales that are intended to be applicable to a variety of situ-
ations. One unfortunate note in the history of religious studies is tied to the
fact that for many years the parables of Jesus were seen as allegories with
specific meanings rather than as parables. As Joachim Jeremias explains,
“Even in the very earliest period, during the first decades after the death of
Jesus, the parables underwent a certain amount of reinterpretation. At a very
early stage the process had begun of treating them as allegories—of attrib-
uting some special significance to every detail . . . and for centuries that kind
of allegorical interpretation obscured their real meaning like a thick veil (1966,
10). Jeremias goes on to lament the years of scholarly writing in which the
parables were not viewed as simple didactic tales but rather as obscure texts
with hidden, specific and esoteric meanings. Jesus himself understood the
role such stories could play in guiding people toward the new insights he
hoped to share. And he knew that equally important was the listener’s con-
nection between the story and the theme of his sermons or discourse. Among
our contemporary self-help book writers a similar understanding prevails,
and it includes many other stories besides the parables.
Psychologist Robert Sternberg’s Love Is a Story: A New Theory of Relation-
ships makes the following direct comment on the ties between story and our
understanding of the kind of life problems addressed by self-help books:
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A clean separation of fact from fiction simply isn’t possible in the context of
personal relationships, because we shape the facts of a relationship to conform
to our personal fictions. As Immanuel Kant pointed out in The Critique of Pure
Reason, if there is an objective reality, it is unknowable. All we can know is the
reality we construct. That reality takes the form of a story.
Love really is a story, then—only we, rather than William Shakespeare or
Gabriel Garcia Marquez or Erich Segal or Barbara Cartland, are the authors.
. . . We relate better to love stories—whether in novels, plays, soap operas, or
elsewhere—than we do to self-help books or magazine articles containing lists
of generic steps we are supposed to take to understand and improve our rela-
tionship. (1998, 5)
Most self-help book writers have noticed, as does Sternberg, how much more
effective stories are than lists, and they have used stories rhetorically to con-
vince readers of the wisdom of their philosophy and suggested practices.
Einfache Formen
When I first studied folklore in graduate school, I was fascinated by a theory
put forth in the early 1900s by German scholar André Jolles. His argument
was that there exists a series of nine “simple forms” (einfache Formen) that
serve as archetypal genres underlying all literature. Each form or genre, he
explained, had a singular attitude or basic mental concern associated with
it, and that concern remained at the core even as each genre developed into
the more complex literary forms we see in written literature today.2 The the-
ory was hotly debated, of course, but my fascination was sparked by the idea
that, like Jung’s psychological archetypes, narrative archetypes may be inher-
ent in the human species. It would go far in accounting for the effectiveness
of stories in the process of informal education. Stories are a natural part of
our learning tool kit. We are easily persuaded by stories.
Among the stories used throughout the corpus of self-help books I have
examined, common are many of the “simple forms” Jolles identified: life
stories, legends, myths, jokes, fairy tales, personal narratives, and anecdotes
or “cases.” Whether Jolles is right or not, these simple narrative forms are
repeatedly employed in the context of self-help books because of that same
effective core of essential meaning that seems to attach itself to each genre.
In other words, self-help book writers are eager and willing to capitalize on
our inherent love for drama and our human programming that favors sim-
ple stories.
What are some of these simple stories, and how have they been used in
self-help books? There are at least a dozen different kinds of story that are
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118 self-help books
used successfully in the self-help books I have read: parables, fables, life sto-
ries, fairy tales, even novels and creation myths, as well as anecdotes, personal
narratives, and what we might call testimonials or case studies, along with a
few children’s stories, supernatural tales, and legends. All of the stories serve
as didactic illustrations. In each case, the story has been chosen, presented,
and often interpreted by the author with the aim of supporting the point or
theme under discussion. No matter what kind of story, its form and dramatic
appeal are tools in the service of the author’s educational objective. Readers
are expected to find the stories not simply entertaining or moving but also
effective, convincing, and, most important, memorable. The very process of
moving from the story’s simple beginning through the dramatic plot toward
the goal or climax catches the reader’s attention and makes the author’s point
seem somehow exactly right and reasonable, perhaps even familiar.
Let me first discuss a few examples of the parable, since these have figured
so prominently in didactic literature all along. Parables show up in self-help
books either as short narratives embedded in a thematic discussion or as long
stories that comprise the whole of the book. One of the most memorable of
this last sort is James Redfield’s Celestine Prophecy. The author offers us what
he calls an adventure parable. The story begins with the narrator (a man who
remains nameless throughout) meeting a friend at a restaurant. The friend
tells him of a recent conversation with a priest in Peru and introduces some
information about a mysterious ancient manuscript found there. The manu-
script, written in Aramaic but translated quickly as each segment is found,
is considered dangerous by the Peruvian government, and the military has
joined forces with the ruling clergy in an attempt to keep knowledge of the
manuscript from spreading. The rest of the book revolves around the nar-
rator’s adventures as he tracks down the nine segments, or insights, that make
up the manuscript. Each insight, of course, is an important lesson or mes-
sage the author hopes to convey to the reader, and the sequence in which they
are presented is essential for constructing the comprehensive psychological
theory and spiritual philosophy that is the author’s “message.”
The characters in Redfield’s book are one-dimensional, rather like the
characters in a fairy tale, and yet the adventures of the main character are
compelling enough to keep the reader’s interest. There is less an aim of real-
ism than of structural support for the goal of finding each of the insights and
testing their wisdom through narrative action. Through dialogue and action,
the author’s intended interpretation of the story emerges as the reader moves
through each chapter of the extended parable. The book has been immensely
successful, and Redfield produced two sequels—The Tenth Insight and The
Secret of Shambhala—as well as a coauthored guidebook to make sure that
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Stories 119
the lessons taught by the parable are clearly spelled out and put into prac-
tice. In many ways, The Celestine Prophecy mimics the success of John Bun-
yan’s seventeenth-century classic, Pilgrim’s Progress, with its aim of demon-
strating, through obvious allegory in Bunyan’s case, how the average human
can live a faithful and satisfying life.
Another example of an extended (though shorter) parable is Dan Mill-
man’s Laws of the Spirit. In it, his also unnamed narrator goes for a hike in
the mountains near his home and encounters a mysterious “sage”—a wom-
an who dresses in green and claims to have known Merlin. She leads the
narrator through a sequence of adventures or experiences that are, for the
most part, not fanciful but rather made significant through the sage’s com-
mentary. The larger story provides a frame for the twelve parable/adventures
that the sage and narrator reflect upon together. Each internal parable serves
to illustrate one of the twelve laws the sage hopes to pass along to the narra-
tor (and the book’s readers).
A number of other writers have tried their hand at such extended para-
bles, some framing their narratives less as adventure stories and more as
novels—for example, Paulo Coelho’s Alchemist (1988) or Wayne Dyer’s Gifts
from Eykis. Another successful parable is Spencer Johnson and Kenneth Blan-
chard’s One Minute Manager, a short story with a “young man” as the main
character. In this and other of Johnson’s One Minute parables, various pieces
of management advice are presented in the context of the young man’s in-
terviews with other representational characters. Again, the narrative serves
to make the advice seem more concrete and memorable. The reader’s iden-
tification with the man and his goals is important in conveying the dramat-
ic significance of each piece of advice. As readers, we want to see the man learn
what he needs to learn through each action or piece of discourse. For exam-
ple, the One-Minute Manager tells the young man a story (parable) about
training a pigeon, which he uses to teach the man about the principle of
“catching someone doing something right.” By the end of the book, the read-
er is hooked into the young man’s learning adventure, even though the char-
acters are one-dimensional and the plot very thin.
Rather than create an extended parable and use it to present her self-help
advice, Marsha Sinetar in Living Happily Ever After adopts the Brothers Grimm
version of “Hansel and Gretel” as the centerpiece of her book and goes through
the tale step-by-step, interpreting the actions depicted in the tale as they teach
us to experience “trust, luck, and joy.” The whole question of the relationship
between fairy tales and psychological theory is itself a separate issue, one that
has sparked such well-known studies as Bruno Bettelheim’s Uses of Enchant-
ment: The Meaning and Importance of Fairy Tales (1976) or Joseph Campbell’s
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120 self-help books
Hero with a Thousand Faces (1949). As Ruth B. Bottigheimer points out in her
own study, Grimms’ Bad Girls and Bold Boys, most such Freudian or Jungian
scholars use the Grimms’ collection to “illustrate or substantiate their theo-
ries of human behavior” (1987, 16). The use of fairy tales by self-help book
writers such as Sinetar is similar and yet notably different; their objective is
rhetorical effectiveness rather than the validation of theory within academic
discourse.
Sinetar, for example, introduces her book’s second chapter with the fol-
lowing sentences taken loosely from Margaret Hunt’s translation of “Hansel
and Gretel”:
[When the children awoke in the forest it was pitch dark.] Gretel began to cry.
“How are we ever to get out of the wood?” she said. Hansel comforted her. “Wait
a bit,” he said, “until the moon is up, and then we’ll find our way sure enough.”
In chapter 1, she had discussed Hansel’s creative and effective response of

collecting and then dropping stones that would show up as a path in the
moonlight. In this chapter, she ties this “lost in the woods” segment of the
story to the development of a basic attitude of confidence and self-assurance.
She offers the following commentary:
Like Hansel and Gretel we develop our threshold for happiness and even our
problem-solving muscles early in life. The person who during childhood knows
himself to be energetic on his own behalf will face setbacks in life in a health-
ier, more optimistic way. Hansel’s comment, “We’ll find our way sure enough,”
depicts how this energy transmits itself into problem-solving skill and attitudes.
(1990, 36)
Thus, segment by segment, Sinetar ties ideas and pieces of advice to the sto-
ry of Hansel and Gretel. Her hope, of course, is that as readers take in the
well-known story, they will hear it not simply as an entertaining tale but as a
familiar touchstone for the messages, the lessons, she is teaching.
Similarly, many other kinds of story are used as exempla in self-help books.
Stephen Covey in his bestseller The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People
makes excellent use of the Aesopic fable “Goose That Lays the Golden Eggs.”
Or, again, the popular Chicken Soup for the Soul (and Chicken Soup collec-
tions for various special groups, such as Christians or teenagers or women)
by Jack Canfield and Mark Victor Hansen is an interesting case in point. The
editors offer no commentary on the selections but simply expect the stories
to speak for themselves. In their brief introduction, they explain: “In our
seminars and workshops we take more time to set up and discuss the impli-
cations of each story. There are more explanations and explorations of how
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to apply the lessons and principles to your everyday life” (1993, xvi). Other
writers are more concerned to make sure that the reader gets the intended
message. Stories, in fact, are so very effective as rhetorical devices that this
difference in how stories are used becomes an intriguing indicator of each
self-help book writer’s working assumption about the process of learning.
This point can be seen more clearly if we look at how writers use the per-
sonal narrative.
Prime Time for Personal Narratives

The use of narrative by self-help writers is so very rich that I can only sug-
gest as a fruitful area of further research this fascinating tie between story and
lesson or message. Attention to just how writers decide which story might
best illustrate a given point or reinforce a specific idea or value is an impor-
tant goal for continuing nonfiction studies. For now, one kind of story cries
out most forcefully for this kind of attention—the personal narrative. I must
admit that I am particularly attuned to hear this cry as I have been interest-
ed in the personal narrative as a folklore genre for many years. The personal
narrative offers an especially telling instance of narrative illustration in self-
help books.
If scholarly reviewers are annoyed with the abandonment of scientific rigor
that characterizes self-help books, if they find it inexcusable that authors offer
testimonials and case studies as illustrations without first subjecting them
to experimental controls that would ensure their repeatability, those reviewers
are sure to be incensed at the writers’ use of personal narratives—their own
stories created from their own experience, included with no apologies for
breaking the cherished rule of objectivity. Yet in the context of self-help books,
personal narratives have proved to be very effective, given that the desired
effect is rhetorical persuasion rather than scientific demonstration. And there
are several reasons why personal narratives in particular have so easily found
their niche in this genre of nonfiction.
In studying verbal folklore, folklorists have always been fascinated by the
choices performers make—why they pick certain songs to sing or stories to
tell and how they decide what contexts would be appropriate or even ideal
for performing certain items from their repertoire. Even more intriguing is
the case of the performer who creates a narrative seemingly out of whole cloth
from his or her own experience or observation and tailors that story to a very
specific context, at least the first time it is told. When I first became interest-
ed in the personal narrative as a folklore genre, I was hopeful that I would at
last be able to see in such stories a kind of literary intentionality at work in
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its seedling stage whenever anyone first articulated an experience in the form
of a story. I would be able, in a natural conversational setting, to see an ur-
form created on the spot, and the relationship between the story and the
context that inspired it would be single-stranded and obvious. The motiva-
tion for creating the story and the teller’s process of manipulating the mix
of experience and convention would be revealed as clearly as though in a
controlled science lab. That hope has long since been dashed, but in its place
is a perhaps less ambitious hope that such stories told in the context of di-
dactic nonfiction might be more cooperative in telling us about the relation-
ship between story and context and between intention and meaning.
Narrative performance in an oral context presents a wonderful challenge to
the folklorist. One response to the challenge is to consider such performances
in light of reception theory, a kind of modified reader-response theory—in
other words, the response of the listener. The listener builds a response as the
performance progresses toward its close, drawing at each moment upon a vast
array of cultural and personal references that are sparked by the overall struc-
ture and by the tiny details and nuances of the performance—an amazingly
complex participation by each individual hearing the story. In other words, the
listener has as much work to do as the teller when a story is told.
The skillful performer will welcome and play upon those many and var-
ied strands of reference and meaning. That is what makes the performance
“artistic.” When someone tells a personal narrative, that person is absolute-
ly dependent upon this process. Listeners must fill in their own personal and
cultural tags of meaning if the story is to be successful as entertainment. In
effect, in most oral contexts, the storyteller gives up interpretive control of
his or her story in order to create a successful performance, one in which the
listener does truly participate.
Contrast with this, then, the case of the author of a self-help book. Most
such writers have learned the power of personal narratives. In many cases,
the writers are counselors who deal with narrative on a daily basis as clients
tell their own stories and hopefully discover some new and helpful meaning
in them. But the stories I am interested in here are the ones authors choose
to include in their books. Very often, of course, these are reworked stories
originally told by their clients. But surprisingly often, the stories are the au-
thors’ own personal narratives, ones created perhaps only for this specific
context—the popular self-help book.
The authors of such books face a peculiar dilemma: if they tell their sto-
ries well—that is, if they offer memorable, artistically successful stories—then
their readers will respond in the usual way, from within the richness of their
own varied frames of reference. On the other hand, if the author seeks above
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all to control the interpretive response of the readers, to guide them directly
toward a specific understanding of the “meaning” of the story, then most
often the story that emerges seems to lack something in the way of memo-
rable story content, or more simply, “artistry.”
In an effort to consider why this situation develops, we might ask first why
the authors choose to include stories in the first place. The authors obvious-
ly have certain expectations. They assume above all that the stories will be
effective in the didactic sense: stories will teach the lesson or make the point
they intend. And stories are memorable. If the reader remembers the story,
then he or she may remember the author’s commentary that accompanied
it as well. A story provides the author with an opportunity to introduce or
repeat a point that is made elsewhere more directly without seeming to be
repetitive and dull. Furthermore, authors know that people are more likely
to believe in or trust information conveyed through the familiar format of a
story. And, perhaps most telling of all, they know that stories help sell their
books. People enjoy reading stories more than dry homilies with little en-
tertainment value.
But why do authors choose their own stories? Why not simply use those
of their clients? Many do, of course, but there are advantages in using their
own stories. Personal narratives are, after all, more personal, and the author
achieves a degree of intimacy with the readers by relating personal narra-
tives. Furthermore, as with oral personal narratives, listeners tend to believe
that someone speaking from personal experience is telling the truth. But,
more important to the author is the fact that personal narratives seem to
offer the writer greater control over the interpretation and application of
the story.
I say “seem to offer” because, despite what writers may believe about the
control they gain from choosing to include personal narratives, they in fact
do not always succeed in controlling the interpretive context to the extent that
they expect. After surveying the many books included in this project, I have
found that there are varying degrees of effectiveness in establishing a corre-
spondence between stories and their intended object lessons. The advantage
to me as a researcher is that authors do make each object lesson perfectly clear.
Somewhere in the vicinity of the story they state clearly the point they are
trying to make. Nevertheless, their assumption that the story itself somehow
makes that same point is not always justified. And it is interesting to see why.
There are a number of structural types or subgenres of personal narrative
that are used in the books. Most common are the following five: the didactic
exemplum, the insight tale, the personal parable, the memorate, and the en-
tertaining or striking anecdote or joke. By far the most common is what I am
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124 self-help books
calling the didactic exemplum. The didactic exemplum exhibits the earmarks
of a story created to suit the requirements of the commentary that follows or
precedes it, a “commentary-requires-story” form. It makes sense that this
would be the most common form. We can easily imagine the author sitting at
his or her computer with the intended point clearly visible, trying to remem-
ber some bit of personal experience that would serve as an appropriate illus-
tration. And generally authors do come up with something—though usually
the story itself is not particularly impressive, often related with little dramatic
flair and reflecting heavy-handed manipulation of slim content.
One writer who uses many such stories is Wayne Dyer, author of Your
Erroneous Zones, Pulling Your Own Strings (1978), The Sky’s the Limit, What
Do You Really Want for Your Children? (1985), You’ll See It When You Believe
It, Real Magic, Your Sacred Self (1995), Manifest Your Destiny, The Power of
Intention (2004), and many other books. Dyer actually uses numerous sto-
ries of various kinds, and obviously to good effect. He has made the nation-
al best-seller list many times, and most of his books are still in print. The high
number of personal didactic exempla in his works is, it seems, simply a re-
sult of his tendency to use stories whenever possible. For example, in one
passage in You’ll See It When You Believe It, Dyer is discussing the concept of
giving rather than taking. To illustrate, he tells the reader that recently he
backed off on a financial misunderstanding that cost him nearly two hun-
dred dollars. But he relates the information as a story; he creates a narrative
by casting the information into a sequential plot that can be manipulated to
serve his point of illustration. Here is his story:
I recently purchased an automobile and found after the closing that the dealer
had added a charge of almost two hundred dollars into the contract, over and
above the price that we had agreed upon. I did not discover this until I had
returned home and looked over the final papers more carefully. For me, this
was a perfect opportunity to practice all that I have been writing about in this
book. Years ago, I probably would have been angry, felt cheated, and had an
unpleasant exchange with the car dealer. Not this time. I simply called, and
expressed my opinion to the salesman about what had happened, and explained
that I did not feel that he had acted from integrity in the closing. I also talked
to the owner, and I again expressed how I felt about it, without any anger or
bitterness. We had a pleasant exchange, and the dealer apologized, but felt that
he could not refund the money since we had signed the papers and after all a
“deal is a deal.” I told him that I did not respect this particular business prac-
tice, and I then let it go. I did not need to forgive him, since I was not owning
any anger about the situation. I vowed I would look more carefully at contracts
before closing in the future. That was the end of it. Until the following letter
arrived some ten days later.
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Stories 125
Dear Wayne:
After giving our conversation on the phone further thought, I have decided
to refund the $188.50 that is in question. I feel that it was a misunderstanding
and not an attempt to mislead. However, our customers’ positive feeling toward
us is very important and I hope that this refund will be evidence of that.
If I can be of any other assistance, please let me know. (1989, 252–53)
In the paragraphs before relating this story, Dyer presents the theme he
hopes the story will illustrate:
What you think about expands. Thus, if your thoughts are on getting all that
you can and beating the other guy who you believe is trying to do you in, then
you are constantly thinking about, worrying about, and planning on the notion
of deception. Your thoughts are focused on the dishonesty of the other guy and
the callousness of the world. That is what will expand in your life, because that is
what you are thinking about. Consequently, you will find yourself getting more
and more fearful about being cheated, insuring yourself against the possibility,
hiring attorneys to protect you, and loading yourself up with adversaries. You
literally put yourself in an adversarial relationship with almost everyone that you
meet. And sure enough, you find this sort of thing continuing to expand. (250)
The story, then, is a concrete example of someone (himself) resisting this

mistrustful, adversarial kind of thinking. He is less concerned with the dra-
matic appeal of the story itself (which is fairly low) than with the appropri-
ateness of the story to his theme. This theme is central to his book—in fact,
to a number of his books. He tries to find many ways to express the idea that
“what you think about expands,” and this personal exemplum is one that
allows him to express the idea in a concrete rather than abstract way.
However, such personal exempla are not very memorable, even if they do
make the point effectively. Somewhat more memorable is the personal in-
sight tale. Such stories are not necessarily more impressive as narratives, but
because the author ties the experience at the base of the story to a telling
personal insight, the story stays with the reader. In this case, often the story
is “memorable” simply because the reader is impressed with how significant
the experience or revelation was for the author. This is one instance in which
the intimacy of the personal narrative works to the author’s advantage. Ear-
ly in the twentieth century, Irish novelist James Joyce borrowed the term
“epiphany” to identify such personally revelatory experiences. In self-help
books, the author who chooses to use such personal insight tales is often
obligated to weave into the story (or at least conclude with) some commen-
tary on the significance of the event relative to the “insight” gained. Other-
wise, the plot may seem thin since the “action” is actually a sequence of
thought rather than the more usual dramatic event.
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126 self-help books
For example, in his book Talking to Ducks, James Kitchens relates a long
story recounting mostly his feelings on a specific Saturday night two years
after his divorce from his wife and subsequent separation from his children.
He writes in minute detail of his thoughts about his efficiency apartment
where he was living, his observations of people walking below as he stood
on his balcony, his sense that maybe he wasn’t even there. He tells how, after
crying uncontrollably for some time, he went to a nearby convenience store
and bought some gum, just to see if the clerk would acknowledge that he
existed. The clerk’s “Thank you” as she took his change was, he said, “among
the sweetest words I ever heard.” Kitchens summarized the insight he drew
from the experience as follows: “My life had been a morass of attempts to be
someone else, someone whom other people wanted me to be. That night of
pain and fear unmistakably dramatized that I did not know me, that I was
not being me. And I knew that I had better do something about it” (1994,
26). His epiphany, his insight, would likely not have been apparent to his
readers without his commentary, and, indeed, the bare content of the story
would likely not have made any impression without the author’s guidance
on why the rather simple actions—crying, standing on the balcony, and
purchasing gum at the convenience store—were important.
Another example of the personal insight tale is the following story from
the classic self-help book The Road Less Traveled by Scott Peck.
Almost all of us from time to time seek to avoid—in ways that can be quite
subtle—the pain of assuming responsibility for our problems. For the cure of
my own subtle character disorder at the age of thirty I am indebted to Mac
Badgely. At the time Mac was the director of the outpatient psychiatric clinic
where I was completing my psychiatry residency training. In this clinic my fel-
low residents and I were assigned new patients on rotation. Perhaps because I
was more dedicated to my patients and my own education than most of my
fellow residents, I found myself working much longer hours than they. They
ordinarily saw patients only once a week. I often saw my patients two or three
times a week. As a result I would watch my fellow residents leaving the clinic at
four-thirty each afternoon for their homes, while I was scheduled with appoint-
ments up to eight or nine o’clock at night, and my heart was filled with resent-
ment. As I became more and more resentful and more and more exhausted I
realized that something had to be done. So I went to Dr. Badgely and explained
the situation to him. I wondered whether I might be exempted from the rota-
tion of accepting new patients for a few weeks so that I might have time to catch
up. Did he think that was feasible? Or could he think of some other solution
to the problem? Mac listened to me very intently and receptively, not interrupt-
ing once. When I was finished, after a moment’s silence, he said to me very
sympathetically, “Well, I can see that you do have a problem.”
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Stories 127
I beamed, feeling understood. “Thank you,” I said. “What do you think
should be done about it?”
To this Mac replied, “I told you, Scott, you do have a problem.”
This was hardly the response I expected. “Yes,” I said, slightly annoyed, “I
know I have a problem. That’s why I came to see you. What do you think I ought
to do about it?”
Mac responded: “Scott, apparently you haven’t listened to what I said. I have
heard you, and I am agreeing with you. You do have a problem.”
“Goddammitt,” I said, “I know I have a problem. I knew that when I came
in here. The question is, what am I going to do about it?”
“Scott,” Mac replied, “I want you to listen. Listen closely and I will say it again.
I agree with you. You do have a problem. Specifically, you have a problem with
time. Your time. Not my time. It’s not my problem. It’s your problem with your
time. You, Scott Peck, have a problem with your time. That’s all I’m going to
say about it.”
I turned and strode out of Mac’s office, furious. And I stayed furious. I hat-
ed Mac Badgely. For three months I hated him. I felt that he had a severe char-
acter disorder. How else could he be so callous? Here I had gone to him hum-
bly asking for just a little bit of help, a little bit of advice, and the bastard wasn’t
even willing to assume enough responsibility even to try to help me, even to
do his job as director of the clinic. If he wasn’t supposed to help manage such
problems as director of the clinic, what the hell was he supposed to do?
But after three months I somehow came to see that Mac was right, that it was
I, not he, who had the character disorder. My time was my responsibility. It was
up to me and me alone to decide how I wanted to use and order my time. If I
wanted to invest my time more heavily than my fellow residents in my work,
then that was my choice, and the consequences of that choice were my respon-
sibility. It might be painful for me to watch my fellow residents leave their offices
two or three hours before me, and it might be painful to listen to my wife’s
complaints that I was not devoting myself sufficiently to the family, but these
pains were the consequences of a choice that I had made. If I did not want to
suffer them, then I was free to choose not to work so hard and to structure my
time differently. My working hard was not a burden cast upon me by hardheart-
ed fate or a hardhearted clinic director; it was the way I had chosen to live my
life and order my priorities. As it happened, I chose not to change my life style.
But with my change in attitude, my resentment of my fellow residents vanished.
(1978, 39–41)
In didactic exempla, such as Wayne Dyer’s story of the extra $188.50 charge
above, the plot, such as it is, is responsive to the author’s need for an illustra-
tion. The reader’s participation in the creation of meaning of the story is lim-
ited by the author’s fairly heavy-handed manipulation of the plot and the au-
thor’s commentary. The reader is never allowed to forget that the reason for
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128 self-help books
the story is to illustrate some specific object lesson. In contrast, Scott Peck’s
insight tale is closer in a number of ways to the traditional, transmission-
polished story. In this case we have a “story-yields-commentary” form, simi-
lar to the tradition associated with the fable. And in Peck’s case, he tells the tale
very much as though he were telling an oral story. The personal insight tale is
different from the didactic exemplum simply in its invitation to the reader to
respond to the story as an account of the process of revelation. The author takes
some risk in telling of a very personally significant event that may or may not
seem significant to others. The author gives some interpretive control to the
reader. Granted, Peck jumps right in with his own commentary, but only after
the reader has already taken in a complete and well-told story, which, by the
way, includes the requisite structural features of the seeming villain and the
reversal or twist at the end that makes the story artistically effective.
The third kind of personal narrative often found in self-help books is sim-
ilar to the personal insight tale. I am calling it the personal parable, though
we might simply view it as what is commonly identified as the single-episodic
personal experience story. It functions to characterize the storyteller, often
somewhat ironically, and, like the traditional parable, it is much more wide-
ly applicable to various situations than is the insight tale. The example I would
like to share here is much too long to include in this chapter, so I will offer
an abridged version and encourage readers to find the original and enjoy the
full version at leisure. The story is one that is included in David Whyte’s 1994
book The Heart Aroused: Poetry and the Preservation of the Soul in Corporate
America.
During a long month of bird-watching in the Nepalese Himalayas, I had been
moving slowly up the Marsyandi river valley on the eastern side of the Annapur-
na range. I had parted from my two companions, a Belgian ornithologist and
a Sherpa guide, telling them I needed a little time to myself, and then taking a
parallel trail, I had promised to meet them farther up the valley in a few days.
On the afternoon of the second day, exhilarated by the clear, thin air and the
ever-nearing white peaks rising around me, I turned sharply from an eroded
cliff path high above an immense black gorge and found myself on a grassy shelf
where the path turned from the rock wall and attempted to cross the drop. I
say attempted, because to my utter dismay, the bridge itself was broken. The
taut metal cables on one side of the narrow footbridge had snapped and the
old rotted planks that made up its floor had concertined into a crazy jumble
in the middle. Looking down through the gaps, I could see the dizzying three-
or four-hundred-foot drop into the dark lichened gorge below.
Whyte then relates at length how stymied and humiliated he felt by this “in-
tractable problem,” given his many other adventures in which he had over-
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Stories 129
come what seemed to be insurmountable obstacles. He even explains that he

has been a rock climber since his early teens. He concludes as follows.
After an hour had passed, I had finally faced up to defeat, made an attempt to
swallow my pride, and determined that there was nothing for it but to shoul-
der my pack and start back down the path. As I reached for my pack, I noticed
the silhouette of a small but strangely shaped figure shuffling into view along
the same cliff path that had brought me to the bridge. I saw her but she did not
see me. An old bent woman, carrying an enormously wide-mouthed dung
basket on her back, she saw nothing but the ground she was so intent on search-
ing. In these bare high places, denuded of trees and fuel, yak dung dries quick-
ly in the parched air and is harvested as a valuable fuel.
She shuffled, head bent, toward me, and seeing at last the two immense boot-
ed feet of a westerner, looked up in surprise. Her face wrinkled with humor as
she registered her surprise, and in the greeting customary throughout Nepal,
she bowed her head toward me with raised hands, saying, “Namaste.” The last
syllable held like a song. “I greet the God in you.”
I inclined my head and clasped my hands to reply, but before I could look up,
she went straight across that shivering chaos of wood and broken steel in one
movement. I saw her turn for a moment, smile almost mischievously, and then
to my astonishment, she disappeared from the sunlight into the dripping dark-
ness of the opposing cliff. Incredulous, but without for one moment letting
myself stop and think, I picked up my pack and went straight after her, crossing
the broken bridge in seven or eight quick but frightening strides. (47–51)
Because the story includes the almost symbolic image or motif of the bro-
ken bridge as well as the contrast between an old but wise woman and a young
but frightened man, we can imagine any number of applications for the
implied lesson. Whyte himself expands on the idea of seeming impasses in
the workplace and how courage and confidence (and perhaps a good exam-
ple) are needed if individuals are to work through problems. The story itself
is well told and memorable. The reader’s invitation to identify with the sto-
ryteller and the storyteller’s thoughts and actions is clear, and the author is
free to make fun of his own fearful feelings while at the same time celebrat-
ing the dramatic and inspiring end to the story.
The personal insight tale and the personal parable are similar in function;
their differences lie primarily in what we might call the quality of dramatic
narrative and the sense of traditional motif. Again, since the stories are per-
sonal narratives rather than traditional tales, their content in both cases is
based on actual experience of the narrator and should not, therefore, exhib-
it the hallmarks of traditional narrative—specifically, a recognizable, tradi-
tional plot and culturally stereotyped characters. However, in the case of the
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130 self-help books
personal parable, the close approximation to the content or motifs of tradi-

tional tales and to the archetypical behavior or actions of traditional dramatis
personae make the story seem more traditional and in fact more satisfying,
“better,” or worthy of repetition. The personal parable can stand on its own
simply as a good story, even though it has that quality of instruction that
makes it particularly effective in a didactic context.
Another kind of personal experience story that has that quality of tradi-
tionality is the memorate. The term “memorate” was suggested in the 1930s
by Swedish folklorist Carl Wilhelm von Sydow to identify stories based on
personal experience, usually involving the supernatural. Embedded within a
memorate is a belief that is demonstrated through the events recounted in
the story. In the past, folklorists and anthropologists often collected such sto-
ries purely for the sake of abstracting and recording the beliefs involved. But
as stories, such narratives have the advantage of being regarded as highly dra-
matic and significant, and thus they can be useful to self-help book writers
not so much as evidence for a belief as a memorable rhetorical device for
underscoring a piece of advice or a more general attitude or perspective.
Many personal experience stories that recount coincidences would be of
this sort. Often the stories are themselves so striking that the point the au-
thor is trying to make gets lost, even though the story has great impact. The
underlying belief, in other words, stands out as the primary message, whether
the author particularly intends to promote that belief or not. For example,
consider the following story related by Wayne Dyer. He offers the story for
the first time in his book You’ll See It When You Believe It, but he refers to it
again in later books (Real Magic, Your Sacred Self, and Manifest Your Desti-
ny), always with the clear intention that the reader associate the story with,
in this case, the theme of forgiveness. It is Dyer’s own story—in fact, his own
special kind of insight tale—and there is little reason to doubt that in his mind
the story and the theme of forgiveness are inextricably linked. However, I
would argue that without his commentary, his readers would not necessar-
ily connect the two. Instead, they would very likely simply take away from
the story some reinforcement of a belief in the mystical workings of synchro-
nicity, or perhaps even in messages or actions from beyond the grave. I men-
tioned Wayne Dyer’s story in chapter 2, but let me offer a few excerpts that
tell the rest of the story.
I was born in 1940, the youngest of three boys, all under the age of four. My
father, whom I have never seen, abandoned this family when I was two. From
all accounts, he was a troubled man who avoided honest work, drank exces-
sively, physically abused my mother, and had run-ins with the law and spent
some time in prison.
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Stories 131
Dyer explains how resentful he became about this abandonment and how
he hoped to some day find and confront this man, his father.
In 1970 I received a call from a cousin I had never met, who had heard a ru-
mor that my father had died in New Orleans. But I was in no position to in-
vestigate it. . . . Then came the turning point in my life. In 1974 a colleague of
mine at the university invited me to take an assignment in the South. . . . When
I decided to go I telephoned the infirmary in New Orleans where my cousin
had reported my father to have been, and I learned that Melvin Lyle Dyer had
died there ten years earlier of cirrhosis of the liver and other complications, and
that his body had been shipped to Biloxi, Mississippi.
He then resolves to seek out his father’s burial place, and he reflects upon
whether or not his father had even given any thought to him and his brothers.
I rented a brand-new car in Columbus to make the drive to Biloxi. I mean
brand-new! The odometer read 00000.8 miles. As I settled in behind the wheel
I reached for the lap belt and discovered that the right-hand belt was missing.
I got out of the car, took out the entire bench seat, and there was the belt, at-
tached to the floorboard of the car with masking tape, the buckle encased in
plastic wrapping, and a rubber band around the plastic wrapping. When I
ripped off the tape and the plastic, I found a business card tucked inside the
buckle. It read: “Candlelight Inn . . . Biloxi, Mississippi,” and had a series of
arrows leading to the inn. I thought it was odd, since the car had not been used
before I rented it, but I stuck the card in my shirt pocket.
I arrived at the outskirts of Biloxi at 4:50 p.m. on Friday and pulled into the
first gas station I saw to call the cemeteries in Biloxi. There were three listed, and
after a busy signal at the first and no answer at the second, I dialed the third and
least impressive listing. In response to my inquiry, an elderly-sounding male voice
said he would check to see if my father was buried there. He was gone for a full
ten minutes, and just as I was about to give up and wait for Monday morning to
do more research, he came back with the words to end a lifetime journey. “Yes,”
he said, “your father is buried here,” and he gave me the date of his interment.
My heart pounded with the emotion of this powerful moment. I asked him
if it would be all right if I visited the grave right away.
“Certainly, if you will just put the chain up across the driveway when you
leave, you are welcome to come now,” he said. Before I could ask for directions,
he continued, “Your father is buried adjacent to the grounds of the Candlelight
Inn. Just ask someone at the station how to get there.”
Shivering, I reached into my shirt pocket and looked at the business card and
the arrows on it. I was three blocks from the cemetery.
When I finally stood looking at the marker on the grass, melvin lyle dyer,
I was transfixed. During the next two and a half hours I conversed with my
father for the very first time. I cried out loud, oblivious to my surroundings.
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132 self-help books
And I talked out loud, demanding answers from a grave. As the hours passed,
I began to feel a deep sense of relief, and I became very quiet. The calmness was
overwhelming. I was almost certain that my father was right there with me. I
was no longer talking to a gravestone, but was somehow in the presence of
something which I could not, and still cannot, explain. (1989, 3–6)
The story is well told, and as with Whyte’s story, I can only recommend
reading the original story in full. Nevertheless, I think even from this short-
ened version, it is apparent that the story itself is memorable, that the cen-
tral theme of coincidence is both elegant and chilling. I do believe that Dyer
succeeds in tying the theme of forgiveness to the story, but that connection
is likely not so permanent as is the memorable quality of the story itself.
People will remember the story far longer than they will the reason it was told
(or in this case, written). Like Whyte’s personal parable, the story itself seems
to have the strength of narrative drama inherent in its structure. The author’s
commentary is icing on a very solid and delicious cake.
Finally, as we might expect, some authors more or less give in to the pow-
er of certain stories and include them with little real hope that the theme or
lesson to which they are tied will be remembered much beyond the page.
Rather, they seem simply to delight in the opportunity to tell a good story.
Such stories clearly could stand on their own as an entertaining anecdote or
joke. Though an anecdote is technically about someone else and a joke is
fictional, I refer to this last kind of personal narrative as a humorous personal
anecdote. Typically, the story has that quality of counterpoint between two
worlds of discourse and expectation that characterizes the joke. And, because
it is a personal narrative, some of the humor comes as well from the reader’s
knowing that the author is making fun of himself or herself and actually
offering some of that friendly psychological exposure that creates intimacy.
One very short example comes from the book What Love Asks of Us by
husband and wife Nathaniel and Devers Branden. The authors introduce the
notion of avoiding too much seriousness and its inhibiting effects, especial-
ly in sexual relations. Devers Branden then relates the following story:
By way of illustrating what we mean by lightness of spirit, I will just men-
tion an occasion when Nathaniel believed we had finished making love while I
entertained the notion that perhaps we hadn’t. Borrowing one of the tools I
sometimes use in therapy, a Snoopy hand-puppet (I will not attempt to explain),
I improvised a new use for it in bed that neither of us had contemplated be-
fore. (1987, 138)
With this story, the folklorist can almost imagine adding a few new motifs to
the shunned X700–X749 section of the Motif-Index of Folk Literature, the sec-
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Stories 133
tion that Stith Thompson, in publishing his six-volume work from 1955 to 1958,
left vacant for humorous but obscene motifs future scholars might want to
include. For example, we might suggest such motifs as X705.12, Snoopy pup-
pet as sex toy, or X715, Wife uses unusual object to trick husband into longer
sex play. That fanciful expansion of the index aside, we can easily identify the
story as a personal anecdote, more memorable for its humorous content than
its didactic application.
Let me close this long chapter on stories in self-help books with one final
example of a personal experience narrative, one that arguably could be placed
among the personal anecdotes simply because it can stand alone as a well-
told story. However, in this specific context it serves as a personal parable.
Clearly the author has related it with that intention. The story is actually taken
from a collection of sermons, and as implied earlier, exempla in sermons are
probably the prototype for the use of narratives in self-help books. Rev. David
Owen’s 1995 book Getting There from Here: Meditations for the Journey in-
cludes one meditation called “Elephants in Our Living Room.” In the course
of that meditation, he relates the following personal narrative:
When I lived in Indianapolis before moving to Bloomington—we lived in
the Broad Ripple area—I enjoyed biking early in the morning several days a
week and my route usually carried me straight north out College Avenue. With-
in two miles of home however there was a big, unchained dog that often lurked
at the top of a steep hill. Just as I came to the top of this big hill, nearly exhausted,
the large and vicious dog would come charging out of its front yard intending
to attack me and I had to peddle as fast as I could to escape him. The hill was
so steep and the dog was so big that biking was becoming less and less fun.
Indeed I began biking less because of the beast.
One day as my wife and I were driving north on that same street, I said, “Now
here’s that big hill where the dog often waits for me at the top.” “What hill?,”
she asked. “This hill!,” I answered. “This great big hill!” But now that my wife
was along observing and rolling her eyes, it didn’t look like much of a hill, but
more like God’s attempt at an incline. When we crested the incline I said, “Now
there’s where the dog often waits” and I pointed toward the white house with
the red shutters. And there the beast was, out in the driveway, except that he
wasn’t huge any more but had somehow become a miniature schnauzer that
looked as though he had been purchased because he was especially good with
children. My wife said, “That’s the beast?” I tried to recover by saying, “Well,
when you’re on a bike and are exhausted from this incline, he looks pretty big
and vicious.” (56–57)
The author ties the story to the theme of his essay: “My point is this: if we
dare to speak aloud about what is bothering us, everyone may not agree as
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134 self-help books
to the size and shape of the beast. When we keep our grievances to ourselves,
they tend to become inflated. Sometimes what we think is an elephant in our
living room is a miniature schnauzer blown up.”
Stories such as these are essential for helping writers persuade readers to
accept a new perspective or alter an old one. Personal narratives have, as I
suggested, found a particularly hospitable niche in the pages of self-help
books, but all of the various kinds of stories used in these works of popular
nonfiction are there because of their effectiveness. In the next chapter, we shall
examine how a closely related genre of folklore—the proverb or traditional
saying—is also used to good effect in many books of popular nonfiction.
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7. Proverbs, Quotes, and Insights
In creating self-help books, writers are eager to tap the great store of cultur-
al resources that makes their works more effective. Some of these resources
are more easily identified than others. As we have seen, traditional ideas are
often hard to spot because such memes or themes are amorphous and am-
biguous; the culture holds them uneasily in an invisible ether of worldview.
Stories are concrete and dramatic; they are effective though at times unwieldy
since they typically must be recounted in full. Another indispensable tool self-
help writers have among their many cultural resources is the memorizable
saying. Again, because the purpose of self-help books is always didactic, the
sayings must be not simply memorable but, if possible, memorizable. That
is, the sayings must be easily memorized so they can be brought to mind and
perhaps even stated aloud whenever applicable. Like schoolchildren who
learn mnemonic devices to help them spell properly or remember the col-
ors of the spectrum, so too are self-help book readers encouraged to mem-
orize phrases or sayings that incorporate various helpful pieces of advice that
can be easily retrieved. Writers often put advice into language that most eas-
ily serves that purpose—into “poetic” language.
More precisely, the sayings that most successfully serve to recall and en-
capsulate useful self-help advice usually exhibit such features as metaphor,
pithiness or conciseness, parallelism, alliteration, rhyme or assonance, and
often traditional referentiality. This is not to say that all self-help book writ-
ers are necessarily aware of the added value of such poetic language. One
successful writer, Ken Keyes Jr., states clearly his advice that readers memo-
rize the “twelve pathways to the higher consciousness planes of unconditional
love and oneness,” which he presents in a number of his books as the cor-
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136 self-help books
nerstone of his Living Love System. In introducing the twelve pathways in

his Handbook to Higher Consciousness, he states:
The Twelve Pathways are presented on the previous two pages. Memorize
these Twelve Pathways in order to implant them deeply into your conscious-
ness. Memorizing helps you use them as programming in shaping your per-
ceptions below conscious levels. Just reading them for intellectual understand-
ing will not permit you to use them as dynamic tools that can make your life
work. Use the Pathways in interpreting your moment-to-moment stream of
consciousness. They can lead you straight into higher consciousness and en-
able you to find the love, happiness, wisdom, and fulfillment that is your birth-
right in life. (1975, 17–18)
Unfortunately, at least to my mind, the actual language of each of those

“twelve pathways” is thick and abstract; there is little that is striking or po-
etic, little that is easily memorizable about the twelve statements.
His first pathway, for example, is: “I am freeing myself from security, sen-
sation, and power addictions that make me try to forcefully control situa-
tions in my life, and thus destroy my serenity and keep me from loving my-
self and others.” I actually tried memorizing this statement and found it a
substantial challenge. I was much too easily discouraged by the cumbersome
language from trying to memorize the other eleven. To some extent, Keyes
intends for his “pathways” to require “work” of his readers, much as one
might have to work to attain the tools that would help with any other sort
of addiction. Still, the hard work of self-education is challenging enough
without this kind of learning obstacle. Other counselors working with peo-
ple we might regard as “addicted” to a poor worldview are much more co-
operative in offering easily memorized, easily recalled sayings that accom-
plish the goal Keyes has set for his readers.
Tim B. Rogers, a member of the psychology department at the University
of Calgary in Canada, offers in an article in the yearbook Proverbium the
following comments on the role that memorizable sayings can have in “ther-
apeutic communities” (TCs) convened to treat drug abuse:
TCs have amassed an impressive collection of techniques oriented toward
maintaining the group. Charismatic leadership, ordered discipline, empha-
sis upon personal responsibility, shared labour, public confession, [and] cre-
ating an air of elitism are just some of the procedures employed—each ori-
ented toward strengthening the group and the members’ commitment to it.
One particularly interesting technique is the use of slogans, colloquialisms
and proverbs.
Alexander Bassin documented the use of these devices in a number of TCs.
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Proverbs, Quotes, and Insights 137
Describing his introduction to a TC he noted the slogan “Hang Tough” prom-
inently displayed upon the entry to the facility. Discussions of the meaning of
such sayings were an important part of the Alcoholics Anonymous (AA) pro-
gramme. In some TCs the therapeutic principles take the form of cryptic com-
ments such as “No cop outs,” “Act as if,” “Turn around,” and “No free lunch.”
A book entitled The Tip of the Iceberg: Slogans and Sayings About Alcoholism,
Drug Abuse, and Recovery, includes a large number of sayings and proverbs that
can be applied to TCs. Examples of slogans popular in these ends of support
communities are:
It’s better to give than to receive.
Water seeks its own level.
We mock the things we are to be.
What goes around, comes around.
These types of sayings, which include proverbs and proverb-like expressions,
have emerged as a significant aspect of the TC. (1989, 104)
The poetic devices that make such expressions memorizable surely must
account for some of their effectiveness in therapeutic situations. Such poet-
ic language would be helpful in self-help books as well. The “twelve pathways”
Keyes asks his readers to memorize would have benefited from the poetry of
proverbial language. It would have made the task of remembering and us-
ing the advice much easier.
I was recently visiting a United Methodist nursing home where the social
director was entertaining some of the residents while they waited for their
meals to be served. She was reading from a book of Bible quizzes, and one
quiz asked the listeners to finish the sentences of the Beatitudes Jesus offered
in the Sermon on the Mount (Matthew 5:3–11 KJV). I was impressed to hear
a number of the residents successfully finish all of the verses, as in “Blessed
are they that mourn: for they shall be comforted” or “Blessed are the meek:
for they shall inherit the earth” or “Blessed are the merciful: for they shall ob-
tain mercy.” Granted, most of those who knew the verses grew up in an era
when many people were routinely encouraged, even required, to memorize
poems as well as Bible verses. Still, it struck me that Jesus had made it easier
for people to do just that by putting the Beatitudes into poetic language that
included (even in translation) active agency, striking images, and parallel-
ism. It still takes some effort to memorize, but poetic language makes the task
easier and perhaps even an end in itself.
Proverbs and their various linguistic kin are, of course, the quintessential
memorizable and memorable sayings. We might expect to see self-help book
writers using proverbs and slogans throughout their works because of their
proven effectiveness. And yet, proverbs themselves—in their pure traditional
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138 self-help books
state—are not featured in popular nonfiction so often as are their modern

adapted parodies, literary equivalents, and personalized imitations.
Proverbs
Proverb scholar Wolfgang Mieder offers the following definition for proverbs:
Proverbs are concise traditional statements of apparent truths with currency
among the folk. More broadly stated, they are short, generally known sentences
of the folk that contain wisdom, truths, morals, and traditional views in met-
aphorical, fixed, and memorizable form and which are handed down orally
from generation to generation. Although proverbs are recognizable through
such “markers” as structure, shortness, metaphor, and style (i.e., alliteration,
rhyme, parallelism, ellipsis, etc.), their actual traditionality and currency will
always have to be established before they can in fact be called “proverbs.” This
requirement differentiates proverbs from such literary genres as aphorisms,
epigrams, maxims, quotations, and slogans. (1998, 525)
Paremiologists (those who study proverbs) and folklorists are reluctant to

identify as proverbs those sayings that have not been a part of oral tradition
or even those traditional sayings that are not metaphorical and expressed in
a full sentence. As Mieder suggests, terms such as “maxim” or “slogan” or
“aphorism” might better be reserved for these related categories. And the
reason is not merely academic nit-picking. True proverbs are clearly derived
from and honed by the culture; other kinds of popular sayings may or may
not be.
The reason this matters at all in our consideration of self-help books is
that one would expect proverbs to be central to the conception and construc-
tion of such books since their function and aims are so very similar—to
convey wisdom in an accessible, even appealing manner. But true proverbs—
“A new broom sweeps clean,” “Don’t count your chickens before they hatch,”
“Don’t throw the baby out with the bathwater,” “Birds of a feather flock
together,” “Look before you leap,” or “It’s always darkest before the dawn”—
are rarely found in self-help books. And the reason they are largely absent
is interesting. True proverbs are stubbornly embedded in discourse; they lose
their full meaning when elicited or proclaimed without a surrounding con-
text. The meaning of a proverb emerges only in the context of discourse, and
the individual who uses a proverb has learned how to use it only from oth-
er contexts of discourse. Thus, proverbs—for both readers and writers of
self-help books—are part of the frame of reference of the culture they share,
but proverbs are rarely set out by themselves; rather, they are used only in
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response to a specific situation. Like Dvora Katz’s parable recorded by Bar-

bara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, the context must tell us the reason why the
proverb is recalled and used; the situation must give us the “performance
meaning,” which may be much more specific than the “base meaning” (see
Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, 1981). Ghanan folklore scholar Kwesi Yankah offers
the following folk explanation:
A newly installed Akan chief once invited to his palace a well known orator to
tell proverbs to the chief. The orator asked the chief to close his eyes for a few
seconds and open them; whereupon he asked the chief, “what did you dream on
closing your eyes?” The chief replied that since he did not sleep, he could not
possibly have dreamed. The orator replied, “Without sleep there is no dream;
without discourse there is no proverb.” (1989, 167)
Yet clearly the Akan chief had a reason to want the orator to “tell” him
proverbs. Proverbs by definition bear the weight of cultural endorsement. By
their very traditionality they can claim an important “proven” status; they
are collective wisdom, even if their application may remain ambiguous. Self-
help writers are understandably in a quandary when faced with the possi-
bility of using proverbs in their books. As mentioned earlier, they typically
claim to be challenging rather than promoting the status quo, the current
worldview, and proverbs are unquestionably part of the “old” worldview. An
interesting consideration of the role of proverbs emerges in self-help writer
Scott Peck’s book Further Along the Road Less Traveled. In reflecting on the
way Alcoholics Anonymous teaches people to move forward with their lives,
he points out that one way they teach is
through the use of aphorisms and proverbs. I have mentioned a few of them,
“Act as if,” and “I’m not okay and you’re not okay, but that’s okay.” But there
are many others—all marvelous gems: “The only person you can change is
yourself.” Or “One day at a time.”
I will tell you a personal story of why I am so convinced that proverbs are
important. I had the kind of grandfather every boy should have. He was not a
particularly smart man, and his speech was seldom more than a series of cli-
chés. He would say to me, “Don’t cross your bridges until you’ve come to them,”
or, “Don’t put all your eggs in one basket.” Not all were admonishments; some
were consoling, like, “It’s often better to be a big fish in a little pond than a lit-
tle fish in a big pond,” or, “All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy.”
He was not above repeating himself, however. If I heard “All that glitters is
not gold” once, I have heard it a thousand times. . . . It was on walks with my
grandfather, back and forth to the double features, that I was able not only to
hear but to digest and absorb his proverbs, and their wisdom has stood me in
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140 self-help books
very good stead over the years. As he himself might have put it, “A spoonful of
sugar helps the medicine go down.” (1993a, 141–42)
Peck’s grandfather did at least have the option of interpreting the prov-
erbs to his grandson, or of using them in specific situations. In his books,
Peck does occasionally include proverbs, but he always amplifies them with
a story or explanation. He says, for example, “Unfortunately, when you re-
act against something that is sinful, you will often go to the other extreme,
and you can get into as much trouble as you were in before. You can jump
from the frying pan into the fire, or, as I often put it, throw out the baby with
the bathwater” (197). Here he is purposefully using proverbs to underscore
his general comment on “reaction formation.” But far more often, self-help
writers use not straight traditional proverbs but rather parodies or “pervert-
ed proverbs,” and then only sparingly, often in the title of a book or a sub-
heading.
When Wayne Dyer titles one of his books You’ll See It When You Believe It,
he is clearly assuming that his readers “get” the allusion to the traditional
proverb “I’ll believe it when I see it.” But the point of the parody or reversed
proverb is tied to our understanding that the idea of believing first and let-
ting that belief determine what we see is quite different from the traditional
notion that we will only believe what we can see. Dyer is using the weight of
culture inherent in the traditional proverb to add a kind of rhetorical sur-
prise and freshness to the “new” idea he is introducing through the reversed
or “perverted” proverb. He is, in fact, drawing attention to the proverb and
its traditionality and then spinning it around in an effort to jolt his readers
into a new point a view.
People as diverse as Ralph Waldo Emerson and cult leaders in the 1960s
have used altered or perverted proverbs to express new perspectives.1 Like
“shaggy dog stories” with their reversals and spoonerisms based on proverbs,
perverted proverbs depend on the readers’ previous knowledge of the prov-
erb being parodied. But in the more didactic context of self-help literature,
as in Emerson’s speeches or the litany of the LSD cult, the reversal is sup-
posed to be taken seriously; it represents a purposeful change in the message
being conveyed. The process is reminiscent of a rhetorical device Jesus used
repeatedly, as, for example in Matthew 5:38–39 (KJV) when he says: “Ye have
heard that it hath been said, An eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth: But I
say unto you, That ye resist not evil: but whosoever shall smite thee on thy
right cheek, turn to him the other also.” The parallelism and metaphorical
nature of the traditional statement are retained, but the message is altered,
in this case, to its direct opposite.
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It might be instructive to consider in this context the writing of one of

America’s earliest self-help writers, Henry David Thoreau. Joseph J. Mold-
enhauer, in a 1967 article for the Journal of American Folklore, examined Tho-
reau’s use of proverbs in his classic work Walden. Like Jesus, Thoreau was
eager to challenge the old order or at least wake people up to the deeper
meaning of phrases and ideas that had become commonplace. In his very
thorough study, Moldenhauer notes the following kinds of proverblike ma-
terial:
The approximately one hundred proverbial and aphoristic items in Walden can
be divided, for the purpose of rhetorical analysis, into three groups. The first
consists of explicit, recognizable, familiar proverbs, whether or not they are
subjected to distortion in their context. Expressions which are analogous in
some respect to particular standard proverbs comprise the second group. The
third contains Thoreau’s original aphorisms, his “new proverbs.” (1967, 155)
As in the writings of contemporary self-help authors, Thoreau’s Walden rare-

ly leaves the intended interpretation of the proverblike material up to the
reader. Thoreau’s use of the proverb form is sufficient to recall cultural as-
sociations for the reader, but it is the new message or the new interpretation
of an old saying that Thoreau wants his reader to take away from the work.
As a didactic writer, Thoreau is committed to the same goal as his modern
counterparts. He recalls the culture’s store of wisdom only to challenge it or
modify it or take it in a new direction.
Some modern self-help writers do offer, like Thoreau, proverblike expres-
sions that are intended to serve the reader as maxims directing their behav-
ior. Peter Senge, in The Fifth Discipline, for example, includes a chapter in
which he discusses the “Laws of the Fifth Discipline,” which include: (1)
Today’s problems come from yesterday’s “solutions.” (2) The harder you
push, the harder the system pushes back. (3) Behavior grows better before it
grows worse. (4) The easy way out usually leads back in. (5) The cure can be
worse than the disease. (6) Faster is slower. (7) Cause and effect are not closely
related in time and space. (8) Small changes can produce big results—but the
areas of highest leverage are often the least obvious. (9) You can have your
cake and eat it too—but not at once. (10) Dividing an elephant in half does
not produce two small elephants. (11) There is no blame (1990, see chap. 4).
Number 5 is a traditional proverb; number 6 is an updated version of “haste
makes waste”; number 9 is a traditional proverb with a modification. All of
the “laws” are intended to function as proverbs, and only number 8 edges
away from the language and style of the proverb. A few self-help writers, such
as Senge, have found a way to make proverbs central to their cause.
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142 self-help books
Quotations, Aphorisms, and Bons Mots

Though they may not use traditional proverbs in their books, many self-help
writers do recognize the role that proverbs can play in articulating and main-
taining a personal philosophy of life. There are a few “New Age” proverbs or
sayings that are included in a variety of self-help books with no alterations
and no apologies for their familiarity, such as the Zen proverbs “When the
student is ready, the teacher will appear” or “Before enlightenment, chop
wood, carry water; after enlightenment, chop wood, carry water” or the more
recent “Be careful what you pray for; you just might get it” or even the Nike
slogan “Just do it.” And some modern writers, following the model of Tho-
reau or Jesus, use the traditional proverb with clear transformations or ob-
vious irony to challenge accepted ideas.
More often, however, self-help writers offer their readers literal maxims
or aphorisms that dispense advice directly, without the ambiguity we asso-
ciate with traditional, metaphorical proverbs. Dennis Prager, for example, in
his book Happiness Is a Serious Problem: A Human Nature Repair Manual,
includes in his discussion of helpful attitudes the adage “This too shall pass.”
In that same section he includes two other quotes, one from German phi-
losopher Friedrich Nietzsche, “That which doesn’t kill me makes me stron-
ger,” and one from Russian novelist Fyodor Dostoyevsky, “To live is to suf-
fer” (1998, 118–19). Prager is careful to expand on the quotes, to offer his own
interpretation. In a similar pattern, Marianne Parady, in her book Seven Se-
crets for Successful Living, selects quotations from Ralph Waldo Emerson’s
many works and offers commentary on their applicability to modern prob-
lems and situations.
Strange to say, however, in many self-help books, literary quotes of the sort
Prager or Parady include are offered with little or no explanation, often as
epigrams at the head of chapters or as independent sidebars or pages. The
thick volume You Can’t Afford the Luxury of a Negative Thought by John-
Roger and Peter McWilliams (1990) is a running series of such quotes with
unrelated discussions of a variety of topics on opposite pages. Almost always
when writers include such sayings, the quotes are simply ascribed to an au-
thor with no documentation identifying the specific source. Often these
quotes are ones that show up in other self-help books. Just a few of the most
common are:
The unexamined life is not worth living.—Plato
Habit is habit, and not to be flung out of the window, but coaxed downstairs a
step at a time.—Mark Twain
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I will act as if what I do makes a difference.—William James
Whatever you can do or dream you can, begin it. Boldness has genius, power,
and magic in it.—Goethe
If one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams . . . he will meet with
a success unexpected in common hours.—Henry David Thoreau
This practice of leading off with uncontextualized but vaguely relevant quotes
is a staple of the literary essay tradition. What is interesting to note in the
corpus of self-help books is just how often the quotes chosen as epigraphs
are borrowed not from venerable authors and poets of the past but rather
from other contemporary self-help writers.
Since self-help writers are often addressing the same issues, it makes sense
that specific ways of articulating an idea or piece of advice might be useful
over and over again. In his 1711 didactic poem “An Essay on Criticism,” Al-
exander Pope gives us the handy couplet that recognizes this process:
True wit is nature to advantage dress’d,
What oft was thought, but ne’er so well express’d.
Some three hundred years later, writers are still eager to borrow pieces of
wisdom that have already been encapsulated in a quotable form. And, be-
cause most self-help writers are a part of the New Age “Aquarian Conspira-
cy,” they share many of the philosophical perspectives expressed through
these increasingly familiar quotes.
In chapter 2, I mentioned the practice of metacommentary so common
throughout self-help literature, and this tendency for self-help authors to
quote each other is a part of it. Jon Kabat-Zinn, for example, is often cited
simply for the title of his book Wherever You Go, There You Are, as is Marsha
Sinetar for the title of her book Do What You Love, the Money Will Follow.
Steven Covey’s “seven habits” are often cited, either singly or as a group: Be
proactive; begin with the end in mind; put first things first; think win/win;
seek first to understand, then to be understood; synergize; and sharpen the
saw. Wayne Dyer is often quoted for his observation that “what we think
about expands.” It is clear that some writers do in fact hope to create quot-
able quotes or bons mots with some of their formulations of “what oft was
thought, but ne’er so well express’d.” Some writers even quote themselves
right along with other sources ranging from the Bible to Plato to Shakespeare
as well as more recent literary figures and other self-help writers.
I was somewhat taken aback the first time I saw that such writers as An-
thony Robbins (for example, in Awaken the Giant Within) or Susan Jeffers
(in End the Struggle and Dance with Life) had selected a piece of his or her
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144 self-help books
own writing as a self-attributed quote to be set apart as an insert or epigraph

or that writers such as John Gray (in How to Get What You Want and Want
What You Have [1999]) or Nathaniel Branden (in The Six Pillars of Self-Esteem
[1999]) routinely lifted telling sentences—ones that were indeed in a more
heightened language and carried the weight of a major theme—and put them
into boxes or lined inserts, inviting the readers to view them as special, re-
peatable sayings. Of course academic writers do often cite their own previ-
ous works, but somehow in the context of a self-help book, the self-citation
seemed perhaps a little too smug and self-satisfied.
And yet, there is in fact a long-standing tradition of promoting and pub-
lishing one’s own aphorisms. In a recently translated volume of the aphorisms
of Phia Rilke (mother of poet Rainer Maria Rilke), translators Wolfgang Mied-
er and David Scrase comment on the aphoristic tradition represented by such
figures as Georg Christoph Lichtenberg, Goethe, Novalis, Nietzsche, Franz
Kafka, Karl Kraus, or Theodor Adorno (1998, 13–14). Phia Rilke’s volume of
219 aphorisms reflects both her own philosophy and many aspects of late-
nineteenth-century European worldview. Aphorisms selected and published
in such a volume function as very short poems. The tradition of publishing
such collections of aphorisms was well established and carried no hints of
hubris on the part of the authors. Instead, such books seemed to be in some
ways forerunners of our modern self-help books.
Indeed, several self-help writers have produced such collections of their
own aphorisms. Wayne Dyer’s Staying on the Path (1995a) offers more than
four hundred sayings. A few of them are quotes from other sources, such as
“Buddha said, ‘You will not be punished for your anger. You will be punished
by your anger’” or “As Carl Jung reminded us, at the same moment that you
are a protagonist in your own life, you are a spear carrier or an extra in a much
larger drama.” Most, however, are his own short, aphoristic sayings, many
of which have appeared in similar form in some of his other books: “You can
never get enough of what you don’t want”; “It’s never too late to have a happy
childhood”; “Being against anything weakens you, while being for something
empowers you”; “We become what we think about all day long”; “Everything
that is happening is supposed to be happening”; “These are the good old
days”; “When you have the choice between being right and being kind, just
choose kind”; or “Circumstances do not make a man, they reveal him.” There
is a fine line between such aphorisms and what I am calling below “insights”
or personal principles. This difference lies primarily in whether the author
offers the saying as a way of stating “what oft was thought” or instead as a
new insight, a personal revelation so profound that it has moved him or her
to put the idea into language that readers will find memorable.
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Insights
Very likely, most self-help writers would claim that the entirety of what they
are offering their readers are “insights” gained from their own research, ex-
perience, and thought. These insights are shared in general through ordinary
prose in a popular nonfiction format that is both understandable and per-
suasive. Ken Keyes’s twelve pathways, for example, despite the rather abstract
and dense language, do represent his primary contribution to the ideas cir-
culating among readers of self-help literature. Not all writers have found a
way to cast their ideas into memorizable sayings, but some have. The hope
of each writer is, of course, that readers will remember the insights they have
passed along to them. James Redfield in his Celestine Prophecy and The Tenth
Insight obviously intended to have his insights pondered and used; he even
offered readers a workbook and an additional commentary (The Celestine
Vision: Living in the New Spiritual Awareness [1997]) that would allow these
insights to be more easily absorbed and applied.
One very successful writer who has capitalized on the power of succinctly
stated insights is Richard Carlson. In Don’t Sweat the Small Stuff . . . and It’s All
Small Stuff, Carlson titles each of his short meditations with a repeatable,
memorizable “insight” that he examines in a few paragraphs. The book title is
the first one. Others are straight “advice” insights such as “Develop Your Com-
passion”; “Don’t Interrupt Others or Finish Their Sentences”; “Let Others Have
the Glory”; or the well-known “Seek First to Understand.” Others take the form
of observations, the kind of insights that clearly reflect Carlson’s own philos-
ophy: “Life Is a Test. It Is Only a Test”; “Praise and Blame Are All the Same”; or
“If Someone Throws You the Ball, You Don’t Have to Catch It.”
Carlson’s chapter titles are very much along the lines of what Mark Goul-
ston and Philip Goldberg in their book Get Out of Your Own Way call “us-
able insights.” Mark Goulston offers a distinction:
Ordinary insights provide relief and better understanding, but they don’t nec-
essarily spark action. Usable insights have a more practical and lasting impact.
My patients find that the insights in this book inspire constructive change and
remain in their minds long after they first hear them. One patient called them
“the gift that keeps on guiding.” (1995, xxii)
Most of the “usable insights” have that epigrammatic quality that makes them
universally applicable: sometimes the easy way out is the right way in; you
can’t live for others without losing yourself; sometimes the grass is greener
on the other side; if you want what you never got from your parent, become
your own grandparent; we always learn from our mistakes, but we don’t al-
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146 self-help books
ways learn the right lessons; don’t look where you’re going, go where you’re
looking; there are always strings attached.
Such usable insights give the reader a sense of the condensed wisdom of
the writer, the essence of personal belief based on experience and study. They
are both an expression of a personal philosophy and guiding principles of-
fered in a form that can be easily recalled and used whenever an appropriate
situation presents itself. The proverblike wisdom and wide applicability of
such sayings are what make them so effective in self-help books. They are a
significant part of the traditional pool of resources that come together in
modern self-help books and grant them an air of both ancient wisdom and
modern creativity. And, as we shall see in the last chapter of this book, all such
resources are potential ingredients in self-help book readers’ programs of
applied self-education.
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8. Finding a Use for Self-Help
Testimonies
One of the most astonishing books I read for this study is The New Psycho-
Cybernetics: The Original Science of Self-Improvement and Success That Has
Changed the Lives of 30 Million People, published by Prentice-Hall in 2002.
The author, Maxwell Maltz, died in 1975. The 2002 publication is not simply
a reprint of his 1960 classic Psycho-Cybernetics; instead, it is an updated re-
vision produced by Dan S. Kennedy, CEO of the Psycho-Cybernetics Foun-
dation and successful motivational speaker. Having read Maltz’s 1960 work,
I found the continuation of his “voice” in the new book somewhat ghostly,
but the editors—Kennedy and the Psycho-Cybernetics Foundation—offered
the following explanation:
In addition to writing the original Psycho-Cybernetics, on which the new edi-
tion is based, Dr. Maltz was a remarkably prolific researcher and writer. By the
time of his death, he had written over a dozen books and three complete courses
of study on different aspects of Psycho-Cybernetics, thousands of pages of
unpublished counseling session notes, interviews, speeches, and radio broad-
casts, and more. All of this material was put into a computer, carefully sorted
and organized, so that Dr. Maltz could continue contributing to new works even
today. Although Mr. Kennedy has also contributed to this book, to prevent
confusion and clutter, you are hearing everything spoken by one voice, Dr.
Maltz’s. It reads as if Dr. Maltz wrote it today, in its entirety. We are certain he
would be proud of this work and that you will benefit from it enormously. (iii)
Clearly the editors are more concerned with the effectiveness of the work as
a self-help therapy than with questions of authorial authenticity. The pub-
lishers chose to use this new creatively remastered voice to make the reading
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148 self-help books
seem much more a book by a single living writer than a work of collabora-
tive scholarship. But to my mind, it raises again the issue of scholarly respect—
not so much for the author as for the genre itself. If the work Dan Kennedy
produced were to be considered a work of scholarship, convention would have
required that he cite the earlier work throughout but demonstrate at each
point where he had built upon and moved beyond his mentor. Instead, in the
new version, the writer Maxwell Maltz and the contents of his book are both
mined as resources available for reinterpretation and expansion without the
careful referencing required by scholarly publishing. Certainly there are le-
gal restrictions that were involved, but in many ways The New Psycho-Cyber-
netics demonstrates once again that self-help authors are writing in a genre
that draws upon a collectively held body of American values and worldview
for its primary content. The usual intellectual property rules seem not to apply
to the fundamental ideas treated in self-help books, writers feel free to en-
gage in “creative cultural plagiarism,” and few authors feel secure in arguing
that they were first to say “what oft was thought.”
The New Psycho-Cybernetics is astonishing, then, both for its clever way of
combining a current and a former author into one and for its ability to high-
light the reported testimonies of the “30 million people” whose lives were
changed by reading the 1960 edition. In the new version, such testimonies are
included at rhetorically effective spots throughout the book and comprise the
entire content of the last chapter, “True Stories of Lives Changed Using Psy-
cho-Cybernetics.” The testimonials included in the new edition are telling for
our study of self-help books, for unlike other stories about the effectiveness
of various therapies, these testimonies speak to the effectiveness of the book
itself. In chapter 6, I cited psychologist Keith Stanovich’s complaint about
paperback book racks full of therapies “backed by nothing more than the
testimonials of individuals who have undergone them and considered them-
selves improved or cured” (1992, 55). Scholars clearly are wary of such anec-
dotal evidence. Such stories, if collected and published, might be persuasive
for lay readers, but scholars in the social sciences will demand more rigor, some
system for employing such stories not rhetorically but rather systematically
as proof or documentation in a reasoned explanation. The new version of
Maltz’s book may benefit from the testimonials of the earlier book’s readers,
but in the arena of academic research, such responses seem too subjective and
untested to be of much use.
Here, I would like to offer a rationale for using some of the kind of testi-
mony readers are often eager to share after reading some of their favorite
authors, just as readers of the 1960 version of Psycho-Cybernetics did. I have
two concerns, however, that must be addressed before we consider how we
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Use for Self-Help Testimonies 149
might use such material. First, my objective is that such testimonies be rec-
ognized not as “evidence” of the effectiveness of the practices celebrated in
the testimonies but rather as valuable components of the personal philoso-
phies of the individuals offering those testimonies. In other words, I agree
with Keith Stanovich when he argues that testimonials cannot be considered
as evidence for proving the effectiveness or validity of various therapies, prac-
tices, or beliefs. I do, however, believe that such testimonies can be useful in
documenting what people believe to be true, what practices they have faith
in. Testimonials in support of certain books individuals have found helpful
are little different, for example, from testimonials in support of recognized
religious practices they have also found helpful. One could collect testimo-
nials (as well as denunciations) from readers, much as the on-line bookstores
do, and use these testimonials as raw data in studies of worldview.
But I do have a second concern. I believe this use of self-help reflexivity is
potentially problematic for the individuals concerned. As with other kinds
of belief, when individuals testify in support of practices they have tried and
found effective, they want those testimonials to be taken at face value; they
want to be perceived as conveying a truth. When scholars put a different spin
on the stories, even a relatively minor change from acceptance of “truth” to
demonstration of “your truth,” those scholars must take responsibility for
altering the material, subtle though that change may be. For this reason, I am
reluctant simply to use testimonies offered in support of self-help books as
documentation of worldview unless the people involved are aware of the
larger question being addressed. In other words, I am increasingly finding
myself uncomfortable with the time-honored practice of collecting ethno-
graphic data without first making those who would share their knowledge
aware of the assumptions and interpretations that may influence its eventu-
al presentation. I am reluctant to take what an individual regards as a unique
truth and demonstrate that it is at some level universal and comparable to
truths that that individual regards as quite different from his or her own. As
an educator, I am happy to guide my students through this process of en-
lightenment, but I feel less justified in bringing research subjects into the
process unawares.
In the field of folklore studies, there are two ethnographic caveats that have
emerged especially with regard to the use of “personal” interview material.
Elaine Lawless, in collecting life story material, has suggested that research-
ers employ some kind of “reciprocal ethnography” that allows research sub-
jects to comment on and effect changes to the ethnographic texts that result
from interviews with them (see Lawless 1993). And earlier than that, David
Hufford (1982) had cautioned against a too-ready acceptance of the “cultur-
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150 self-help books
al source hypothesis.” His concern in his study The Terror That Comes in the
Night was that researchers often interpret personal testimonies of “experi-
ences” as not accurate reports of personal experience but rather tradition-
based stories built upon beliefs already a part of the culture. With either of
these two ethnographic cautions, there is a worry that individual commen-
tary, whether narrative or interpretive, will be subsumed within a “tradition”
whenever it is shown to correlate with patterns or themes already a part of
the culture. For readers of self-help books, then, much of their individual
response might be seen as simply a predictable conduit for a traditional
“meme” already a part of the culture and now being passed along through
the books they read.
Some readers are aware, of course, of how “traditional” much of what they
have read really is. For example, in an on-line review for Spencer Johnson’s
best-seller Who Moved My Cheese? (1998), the reviewer offers the following
comment: “The success of the book lies in a message that everyone agrees
with anyway. We all nod our heads in agreement as we read it, and smile when
we finish, knowing that from now on, we’ll look at change with a whole new
perspective. It might be an oversimplification, but it works. I therefore rec-
ommend it. But just remember, it says nothing new” (Linda Linguvic, July
22, 2001, amazon.com). The reviewer is well aware that Johnson’s advice is
traditional advice, but she does at least expect her own readers to accept her
evaluation that “it works.” Her motive is the same as that behind most testi-
monials: she hopes to persuade others to read the book because it solved her
problem, answered her question, or cured her ailment.
How can we more effectively make such testimonials part of the study of
American worldview? One way is simply in recognizing that the values ex-
pressed through self-help books are accepted readily because they are already
shared and validated by most members of the culture. This acceptance has
nothing to do with the validity of therapy or suggestions offered by the books’
authors. In other words, as Lawless and Hufford warn us, we must take indi-
viduals’ testimonies as genuine expressions of personal philosophy and be-
lief even if the beliefs involved are not newly learned through the books they
credit with having conveyed them. In the case of self-help books, the “bor-
rowing” from tradition is more pronounced than it would be in works of
scholarship or literary fiction, more along the lines of the kind of borrow-
ing seen in the creation of other popular-culture artifacts, such as horror
movies, hero comic books, or paperback romances. The ideational content
of self-help books nearly always emerges as a kind of “creative cultural pla-
giarism.” The originality comes in how the content is presented, for the con-
tent itself—the traditional American values—comes from the authors’ sur-
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rounding culture. In contemporary America, self-help authors are instru-

mental in transmitting to a new generation the values that are central to what
we think of as “American character.”
Daily Life and American Character

In a recent collection of readings and commentary tying the discipline of
folklore study to the larger concerns of American studies, Simon J. Bronner
probes many of the issues linked to both the idea of the transmission of val-
ues and the notion of “American character” (see Bronner, 2002, 3–70). He
voices, first, the continuing conflict between micro and macro that haunts the
relationship between folklore and American studies. Reviewing the impor-
tant earlier attempts of historian and folklorist Richard Dorson to bridge the
gap between the microcosm of folklore or “folk groups” and the macrocosm
of American history, Bronner writes, “Dorson worried that these minute ac-
counts of unique performances would be difficult to compare and relate to
themes or events of national historical significance” (32).
And Bronner goes on to comment on a later popularizer of traditional
materials, William Bennett, whose 1993 publication Book of Virtues was in-
tended to bolster the teaching of American values, American character. Rec-
ognizing that Bennett’s political leanings entered into the reception of this
book (and its later television series, Adventures from the Book of Virtues),
Bronner writes, “One need go no further than look at the furor over popu-
lar uses of folktales to find political divisions over the character of Ameri-
can tradition. Sides in the culture wars found it essential to locate a folklore
that would legitimize a claim to an authentic tradition at the heart of an
American culture” (56). In short, when folklorists claim that the materials
they study are not simply reflective of the values and character of some small,
obscure, homogeneous “folk group” but rather reflective of the values and
character of “America,” then suddenly there is much more at stake.
At stake is not only the idealized self-image of the nation but also the
methodological assumption that no one individual (unless he is a “great
man”) nor one group of people can “represent” America. Typically folklor-
ists doing fieldwork in America do not themselves claim that their studies
represent anything beyond the worldview of the individuals they study, and
yet they are aware that once the folklore is out there in the public eye, it may
well be seen as reflecting an American worldview, an American character. This
worry over representation is a concern of public folklorists, museum cura-
tors, and others who seek ways to present folklore in public contexts (see, for
example, Norkunas, 1993).
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152 self-help books
One folklorist/American studies scholar who has addressed this concern

is Jay Mechling (2000). He has posited the idea of viewing various institu-
tions as “mediating structures” and argues that there is a need to see how our
understanding moves from individuals or folk cultures to the larger entity
identified as the “civil sphere” and, by implication, American culture in gen-
eral. He writes of the debate between what he calls “traditional liberals” and
“communitarians” and says of their conversation:
Most liberals and communitarians seem to agree that the debate cannot con-
tinue only in the abstract realm of philosophical and political ideas but must
become ethnographic in its methods and sensibilities. That is to say, many of
these authors see the close study of how Americans lead their everyday lives and
of how these Americans “talk” about their lives as providing crucial evidence
for understanding how Americans actually practice living in a liberal demo-
cratic state, how (for example) Americans construct an everyday morality or
how they balance everyday decisions. (114)
In keeping with Mechling’s assertion that the close study of concrete mate-
rials is needed, we might envision the tradition of self-help books as an “in-
stitution” and thus, potentially, a mediating structure that bridges the span
between individual readers and their personal life decisions and the body of
American values the writers convey through their books.
More to our purpose here, we might return to Peter Kramer’s comment
in his book Should You Leave? Prefacing his series of hypothetical interviews,
he states: “One way or another, I must come to know you. Otherwise I will
be limited to something that is not quite advice—perhaps the transmission
of values; because what passes for advice outside the individual encounter is
often just the transmission of values” (1997, 34). Here, I think, is the crux of
the matter with regard to what self-help writers are actually doing when they
offer to help their readers. They are participating in a literary tradition whose
primary purpose is the transmission of values—in this case, American val-
ues. And, taking a cue from Mechling, we can view the voluminous body of
self-help books as a shared and “mediating” structure—as a common text
or secular bible—in response to which individual ideas or interpretations can
be articulated.
Mechling asserts that the debate over ties between the individual and the
values of the larger culture “must become ethnographic in its methods and
sensibilities.” This study of self-help books is only a step in that direction.
My hope is that, with a clearer understanding of the texts that many Amer-
icans find so useful in their efforts to act wisely, the important work of doc-
umenting the elusive personal philosophies of typical Americans can pro-
08.Ch08.147-156/Dolby 152 2/7/05, 10:24 AM

ceed more effectively. Unlike Wendy Kaminer and Tom Tiede, who see self-
help books as misleading quackery cast upon an unwary reading public, I
view such texts as individually significant parts of the rich cultural frame of
reference each reader draws upon as he or she absorbs, uses, and passes along
the shared values that define America. Kaminer and Tiede may be right in
lamenting what they perceive as poor literary discrimination on the part of
contemporary Americans who eagerly devour self-help books; nevertheless,
such books are the “mediating structures” that allow individuals to take in
abstract values, digest and understand them, and then apply them in their
daily lives. Self-help book writers are selling accessible wisdom in the best
sense of the word.
The Personal Philosophies of Typical Americans

The logical next step after examining the self-help book as a cultural artifact
would be to determine how individuals use examples of the genre as they
construct their personal philosophies, how they incorporate their reading of
self-help books into their ongoing learning projects. As I suggested earlier,
the most effective kind of data would be the result of ethnographic interviews
with people who read self-help books and refer to them within the context
of their actual life decisions and their emerging personal philosophies. In
many ways, the self-help book phenomenon itself is the mediating structure
that will elicit individual responses. It is not essential that an interviewer,
talking with an individual, know and have read every book the individual cites
as significant in his or her thinking about what is wise and effective behav-
ior and belief. Rather, it is important that the interviewer recognize that each
self-help book the individual cites is simply a stimulant, a catalyst, for creat-
ing an individual response that combines tradition within a personal phi-
losophy.
And my own caveat for researchers undertaking such study would be that
they each, before interviewing others on such personal material, individual-
ly review and reflect upon the process through which their own personal
philosophies have developed. As I wrote this study of self-help books, I con-
tinually dipped into my own thoughts on what I believe, what I hold as val-
ues, what ideas on effective behavior I encountered in self-help books vibrated
with my own convictions, and I often felt tempted to illustrate the process
involved through these examples from my own life. But I suspect that each
of my readers will in fact create such an ongoing personal response for him-
self or herself; at least that would be my hope. And these internal texts will
be much more effective than would be my personal illustrations. It is a les-
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154 self-help books
son I learned from the self-help writers—books are most useful when they
spark personal reflection.
However, let me close with a quick look at someone who has already ad-
dressed this issue of the interviewer’s responsibility, especially when under-
taking the study of personal philosophy and American worldview. What re-
searchers do when they interview individuals about their personal responses
to self-help books will have many parallels with the process of spiritual in-
struction, no matter what religious or spiritual tradition is involved. Inter-
viewers, like religious leaders, have a responsibility to be as transparent as
possible, to in effect treat the interviewee as an equal rather than as a sub-
ject. I was made aware of this responsibility through the “metacommentary”
of one writer who is also a United Methodist minister, David Owen. In 1995,
David Owen brought together twenty-four of the many sermons he had given
over a five-year period and published them as a book, Getting There from
Here, and more recently he offered in book form another set of twenty-sev-
en sermons titled Wending Our Way (2002). In addition to these books, Rev-
erend Owen makes his sermons available via e-mail to those who ask. Just
before he moved away from the church at which he had given the sermons
in his earlier book, he offered his congregation a sermon in which he out-
lined his beliefs about life, making the following comment:
I have forgotten the name of the book and the author now, but I remember
reading a book about Christian missions almost forty years ago. The author
was responding to the question “What right do we have to impose our be-
liefs about life on others?” We don’t have any right to impose them, he said,
but we have a right to share them. Moreover, we have a responsibility to share
them, whatever our point of view. . . . That is an important way to help one
another—to share as honestly and straightforwardly as we can what we have
found to be true. (1996)
He then offered ten sentences, ten themes that represent his “personal creed”:
Life is good.
God is generous, merciful and trustworthy.
I believe that I am accepted, valued and loved by God.
I also believe that you and all others are accepted, valued, and loved by God.
I believe that suffering, tragedy, and injustice are real.
And I believe that trying to alleviate them is faithful work.
No love is ever wasted.
I am convinced that death is not the last word—that life often comes from
dying—that there is always more to life than we are able to see.
And I believe that we are never totally hemmed in or stuck, but that a doorway
08.Ch08.147-156/Dolby 154 2/7/05, 10:24 AM

always exists—that no matter when or where we are, a path to the future is
open.
And I believe that while much is occurring in this world that is not in harmony
with God, nevertheless God’s will shall triumph ultimately.
Interspersed throughout this bare-bones list are brief discussions of some

of the points. But even with this added commentary, the starkness of the list
impressed me with the great effort that must have gone into paring down
the accumulated wisdom of one’s whole life into a series of ten sentences.
He offered them in an effort to help his congregation; he felt a responsibility
to do so. But it is interesting and telling, I think, that he admits to his con-
gregation that the list was not created originally for them. He says:
It may even help us to sit down and do our best to sort out our life experiences—
to sift through our lives for the kernels of truth that are our own. I have not
done that formally and comprehensively for some time. I have the feeling that
I will soon need to do that again. But several years ago I did sit down and tried
to crystallize what I have found and believe to be true.
He then offered the list of ten beliefs outlined above. His list, at least origi-
nally, was created for himself, as part of his own learning project.
The list of themes or beliefs is sparse; we can assume that much of what is
offered in David Owen’s sermons is an expansion of one or more of these
themes. We can assume that he has drawn upon an abundance of cultural
resources in creating each sermon, including current books of popular non-
fiction. In his books, he refers to some of the very authors that might be found
in a list of popular nonfiction writers: Reynolds Price, Lawrence LeShan, Paul
Erlich, Jacob Needleman, James W. Jones, May Sarton, Julia Cameron, Thom-
as More. His primary sources are, as we might expect, the Hebrew and Chris-
tian Scriptures, but clearly he has made use of a great variety of cultural re-
sources in undertaking his own learning project. Unlike most individuals, he
has been required by his profession to articulate his emerging philosophy in
a growing series of sermons or essays. His congregation and we who read his
books are the fortunate bystanders, the recipients of this atypically written
and shared learning project.
What might we discover if we had more such “texts,” more information
on the personal philosophies of individuals? Would we have at least some
sense of how useful self-help books have been (or have not been) in the con-
struction of an American worldview? My hope is that this study might serve
as background for collecting that kind of ethnographic material and for even-
tually interpreting it within a respectful, collaborative analytical framework.
08.Ch08.147-156/Dolby 155 2/7/05, 10:24 AM

08.Ch08.147-156/Dolby 156 2/7/05, 10:24 AM
Epilogue
What can we conclude, then, about why Americans continue to read self-help
books? We might take the somewhat cynical stance that self-help literature is
addictive and that unsuspecting readers get hooked on their fix of self-help
advice as surely as smokers get hooked on purposefully interlarded nicotine.
We might view readers and writers alike as participants in the revered Ameri-
can “pursuit of happiness.” We might recognize the whole enterprise as sim-
ply a continuation of the popular expression of a shared American worldview
and regard self-help books as individual performances within that collective
popular culture tradition. As a researcher, I admit that I have failed to “prove”
any one of these explanations—or any other, for that matter. As Thomas Kuhn
warned us four decades ago, “why” questions are answered with explanations
that reflect much more about the researcher’s working paradigm and person-
al perspective than we usually acknowledge. I started with a folklorist’s para-
digm and a personal affinity for introspective reflection and personal narra-
tive, and I have not abandoned either of these in writing this book. However,
I have been challenged by the materials I have examined to look to the larger
context—the macrocosm of American social history and the role of popular
culture—and I have tried to incorporate this more inclusive dimension into
my own understanding of the phenomenon of the self-help book in America.
Viewing self-help books within this larger context has convinced me that
readers gain something valuable from their reading; it serves an important
need. And that need is not to have an authority tell them what to do. Instead,
it is to have a source of stimulation for thinking about what they believe, and,
perhaps most important, it is a source of inspiration to act, to engage, to face
life courageously and confidently. Americans keep reading self-help books
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158 Epilogue
because they benefit from the variety of ways these many texts call up their
natural desire to enjoy life and become who they are meant to be, solving
problems along the way and learning the wisdom of the ages in an accessi-
ble form. Self-help writers are the engaging teachers most Americans wish
they had in an ongoing leisure-time Chautauqua. Though self-help readers
may pick up a given book with the aim of solving a particular problem, they
keep reading the latest products of their favorite authors because those au-
thors reinforce their optimism, their typically American “can-do” spirit and
hope for the future.
But, to recall someone who actually attended some of those early Chau-
tauqua teach-ins and to indulge my own penchant for the personal (and to
close this book), I will return again to the vignette in the preface in which
my grandmother sat reading her Bible, thinking her thoughts, and writing
in her daybook. My grandmother found inspiration, guidance, and comfort
in the Bible. Unlike me, she did not feel the need to seek out other kinds of
resources—what Paul Tillich calls “contemporary, secular manifestations of
the sacred” (see Coles, 1999, 7). She was content to ponder the wisdom that
her culture’s primary sacred text had to offer, both for her spiritual enlight-
enment and for her psychological well-being. But it is possible she would have
gladly welcomed these “contemporary, secular manifestations of the sacred”
that I and many others have found useful—the self-help texts we now take
so for granted.
The field of folklore has always had to contend with bridging the chasm
between the “public” and the “private.” In considering the role of self-help
books in the process of self-education and especially in the process of build-
ing a personal philosophy, we must move constantly between these two are-
nas. The larger cultural frame of reference is the source of many ideas and
materials that writers and readers use in creating or reading a self-help book,
and yet it is the individual reader who uses such books in the private task of
building a personal philosophy. As mentioned earlier, Jay Mechling has sug-
gested we borrow the concept of “mediating structures” in our efforts to
understand how concrete artifacts and specific experiences relate to and in-
teract with abstract American culture. He reminds us, in fact, that “Ameri-
cans never experience abstract ‘American culture’” (1989, 347). Instead, we
might view self-help books as “mediating artifacts” that allow us to see how
abstract, impersonal ideas in the culture become a part of an individual’s
private philosophy. In their desire for self-education, people engage person-
ally with each self-help book they read, and they allow these books to medi-
ate between the values of the culture (both those values about which we
cringe and those the writers would have us choose) and their personal val-

Epilogue 159
ues. Through the process of reading self-help books, readers “experience”

abstract American culture concretely, personally. Each writer serves as a pri-
vate mentor even as he or she writes in a public domain.
For me, my grandmother was one of the first of my many mentors. Among
the others are people like David Owen—and the many authors of self-help
books I have read for this project. The role of such mentors in the tradition
of self-education is a complex one, combining as it does many aspects of the
folkloric process, the more formal educational process of schools and col-
leges, and the many often overlooked items from our rich cultural frame of
reference. I hope that this study brings greater awareness of and apprecia-
tion for the contribution such popular nonfiction makes to American cul-
ture and, of course, our individual philosophies and practical engagement
in daily life.
I think the self-help writers all convey, in one way or another, the convic-
tion that life—even life in our often violent and problematic contemporary
culture—can be trusted. And, believing that, they try, as Gregg Jacobs says
in The Ancestral Mind, to “reframe the negative monologue” that is the com-
mon theme of our cultural conditioning and instead offer hope to their read-
ers. Though I have written here as a scholar and critic, I share the optimism
of the self-help writers and their readers. These accessible and engaging books
of popular advice are a good thing. People read self-help books because they
feel better for having read them. Accessible wisdom is essential in America’s
traditional ideal of an educated citizenry, and the self-help books that just
keep filling the marketplace are evidence that most Americans are not dour
and down in the mouth but instead hopeful and determined to improve
themselves and meet life head on. We should all have such eager students!

Notes
Chapter 1: American Popular Self-Education

1. Bercovitch, 1981, 9; see also Bercovitch’s fuller discussion of the concept within the
framework of the Puritan “errand into the wilderness” in his book The American Jeremi-
ad (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1978).
2. Senge, 1990, 5; see also the discussion of the relationship of the individual to the
community as represented in adaptations of Arthur Lovejoy’s “great chain of being” in
Greven, 1977, 194–98.
3. Charles Taylor in Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity (1989) offers
a full discussion of a history of “understanding of what it is to be a human agent.” Though
Taylor does look to some popular books, such as the influential Passages by Gail Sheehy,
his focus is upon the development of notions of “inwardness” and subjectivism in mod-
ern philosophical thought. Contrast to this Philip Cushman’s discussion of “the empty
self” of the modern era in Constructing the Self, Constructing America: A Cultural History
of Psychotherapy (1995).
4. Cross, 1981, 63–66 and 186–99; Knowles, 1978; Tough, 1971. Cross’s book is the clear-
est survey of the consideration of self-directed adult education represented by research-
ers Knowles and Tough. Her bibliography includes additional references by these and other
scholars.
5. Nel Noddings discusses the role of constructivism—which assumes that all knowl-
edge is constructed and never the result of passive reception—in the overall philosophy
of education in her book Philosophy of Education, 1995, 114–19.
6. Bruce, 1974, 63–70, discusses the “morphology” of the conversion experience as it
was intuitively recognized among the people who attended church camp-meetings dur-
ing the Great Revival period; essential to the experience was the phenomenon of “con-
viction” or an acknowledgment of the unsatisfactory life the sinner had led before and
the need for divine help before a conversion could take place. By analogy, the reader
“needs” the help of the writer to move from an unenlightened state to an enlightened one.
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162 Notes to Pages 30–140
7. In his introduction to The Art of the Personal Essay: An Anthology from the Classical
Era to the Present (1994), editor Phillip Lopate offers a distinction between the formal and
informal essay and further specifies the conversational style of what he calls the “person-
al essay.”
8. Best known is Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed (1970). Important references
can be found in Berryman, 1987. An interesting interpretation of the role of “personal-
ism” in other “radical” religious movements arising at the same time as liberation theol-
ogy can be found in McCarraher, 1997.
Chapter 2: The Books, the Writers, and Metacommentary

1. For a discussion of etic and emic categories, see chapter 4, “Units of Observation,”
in Pelto and Pelto, 1978.
2. George L. Dillon develops this point very effectively in his book Contending Rheto-
rics: Writing in the Academic Disciplines (1991). In reviewing one English teacher’s pro-
posal to teach the “genres” and conventions of writing in other disciplines, Dillon laments
that the teacher “conceives of disciplinary discourse principally in terms of forms (which
pose ‘constraints’) along with some differences of evidence and types of argument” (3).
Chapter 3: The Critics, the Simple Self, and America’s Cultural Cringe
1. Philosopher Norman Melchert wrote a clear and provocative book on relativism ti-
tled Who’s to Say? (1994); the various views of the issue are presented in the form of a play
with six different characters for the six general philosophical perspectives he presents.
2. See the discussion in a short article by Jennifer K. Ruark titled “Redefining the Good
Life: A New Focus in the Social Sciences,” in which she outlines an emerging shift “from
a disease model to a health model” (1999).
3. See Tennant and Pogson, 1995, 131–35, for a discussion of skills a competent adult
learner must have.
Chapter 6: Stories
1. See Brunvand, 1963, for a classification of shaggy dog stories.
2. See Ben-Amos’s introduction to Folklore Genres for a concise discussion of the the-
ory (1976, xxvii–xxx).
Chapter 7: Proverbs, Quotes, and Insights

1. See LaRosa (1972) on Emerson and Bauman and McCabe (1970) on LSD cults.
10.Notes.161-162/Dolby 162 2/7/05, 10:26 AM

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Vyse, Stuart A. 1997. Believing in Magic: The Psychology of Superstition. New York: Oxford
University Press.
Waitley, Denis. 1979. The Psychology of Winning. New York: Berkley Books.
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Wallace, Doris B., and Howard E. Gruber, eds. 1989. Creative People at Work. New York:
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Walsch, Neale Donald. 1995. Conversations with God: An Uncommon Dialogue, Book 1.
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———. 1998a. Conversations with God: An Uncommon Dialogue, Book 2. Charlottesville,
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———. 1998b. Conversations with God: An Uncommon Dialogue, Book 3. Charlottesville,
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———. 1999. Friendship with God: An Uncommon Dialogue. New York: Putnam.
———. 2000. Communion with God: An Uncommon Dialogue. London: Hodder and
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11.Biblio.163-182/Dolby 182 2/7/05, 10:29 AM
Index
About Love (Solomon), 77 (Santrock, Minnett, and Campbell), 16,

academic study subtype (essay form), 44, 35, 37–38, 54, 89–90, 98
45–47, 162n2 (chap. 2) authors: as authoritarian experts, 58–61;
activist pedagogy, 32–33, 162n8 classic self-help authors, 50, 89; conver-
Adorno, Theodor, 144 sion experiences of, 48–49, 112, 161n6;
Adrienne, Carol, 41 credentialing of, 6–8, 46; as cultural crit-
adult education. See education; self-educa- ics, 7, 69–71, 74–75; as cultural perform-
tion ers, 84–85; dependence on cultural refer-
advice: context of, 14–15, 76, 152; love as core ence, 9–10, 150–51; as educators vs.
value for, 82–83; role of questions in, 81 opportunists, ix, 8–9, 15; interpretive con-
Alchemist (Coelho), 119 trol and, 13, 122–23; literary intentionality
All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kin- and, 19, 121–22; scholarly vs. practical
dergarten (Fulghum), 64 purposes of, 38–39, 54, 60
All You Can Do Is All You Can Do but All You automigration, 73, 95
Can Do Is Enough! (Williams), 40 autotelic personality, 109–10
Alpert, Richard. See Ram Dass Awaken the Giant Within (Robbins), 48,
altruism, 30–34. See also cultural critique 143–44
American Popular Psychology: An Interdisci- Awareness (de Mello), 30, 44
plinary Research Guide (Fried), 16, 36
Amish, 21 Baida, Peter, 50
Ancestral Mind (Jacobs), 81, 159 Barbach, Lonnie, 40
Anderson, Walter, 40, 78 Barzun, Jacques, 26
anecdotes, 62, 132–33 Bascom, William, 10, 16–17, 73
Aquarian Conspiracy (Ferguson), xi, 31 Bassin, Alexander, 136
Artist’s Way: A Spiritual Path to Higher Cre- Bauman, Richard, 14, 84
ativity (Cameron), 41, 42–43 Be Here Now (Ram Dass), 107
Art of Public Speaking (Carnegie), 89 “be here now” (time concept), 107–11
As Above, So Below (Miller), 99 belief, 72, 84–85, 97, 102
Australia, 68 Bellah, Robert: disciplinary affiliation of, x;
authentication, 7–8, 16, 123 on individualism vs. commitment, 29, 91,
authoritarianism, 58–61 97; on loss of community, 20–21, 101; on
Authoritative Guide to Self-Help Books social commitment, 30–31
12.Index.183-192/Dolby 183 2/7/05, 10:30 AM

184 Index
Ben-Amos, Dan, 87 Chicken Soup for the Soul (Canfield and
Benedict, Ruth, 50 Hansen), 43, 120
Bennett, Milton J., 96–97 class, 5–6, 59–60, 69
Bennett, William, 151 codependency, 99
Benson, Herbert, 44 Coelho, Paulo, 119
Bepko, Clauda, 45 Coles, Robert, 32
Bercovitch, Sacvan, 21 Communion with God: An Uncommon Dia-
Berryman, Phillip, 33 logue (Walsch), 43
Bettelheim, Bruno, 119 community, 20–22, 32–33, 97, 101, 136–37
Bible: parables in, 21–22, 42, 115–16; quoted Compassion in Action (Ram Dass and Mira-
in self-help books, 143; as self-help book, bai Bush), 31, 104–5
vii, 158; use of poetic language, 137, 140– Comte-Sponville, André, x–xi, 67
41. See also religion Confidence Course: Seven Steps to Self-Fulfill-
bibliotherapy, 35–36 ment (Anderson), 40, 78
biography. See life stories consumerism, 8–9
Blackmore, Susan, 72–73 context: advice marketplace as, 14–15, 76–77;
Blanchard, Kenneth, 22, 119 as folklore concept, 12; reader response
Bly, Robert, 43 and, 13–14, 122; text and, 84, 86
Book of Virtues (Bennett), 151 Conversations with God: An Uncommon
Borysenko, Joan, 40 Dialogue (Walsch), 24, 43, 56, 105
Bottigheimer, Ruth B., 120 conversion narratives, 48–49, 112, 161n6
Branden, Devers, 132 Corporate Shaman: A Business Fable for the
Branden, Nathaniel, 132, 144 Modern Age (Whiteley), 42
Brandes, Stanley, 65 Cosmic Questions: Galactic Halos, Cold Dark
Breaking Free: A Prescription for Personal Matter, and the End of Time (Morris), 44
and Organizational Change (Noer), 39 Cosmology and Creation: The Spiritual
bricolage, 85, 91–92, 92 Significance of Contemporary Cosmology
Brockelman, Paul, 47 (Brockelman), 47
Bronner, Simon J., 151 Covey, Stephen R.: classification of books
Broughton, Richard S., 113–14 by, 38; cultural detachment and, 67; on
Brunvand, Jan Harold, 5 the obligation for self-improvement, 21–
Bunyan, John, 119 22; quoted by other writers, 143; Seven
Bush, Mirabai, 31 Habits of Highly Effective People, 4; use of
business self-help books, 40, 50 fables, 120
Butler-Bowdon, Tom, 56, 99 creative cultural plagiarism, 14–15, 148, 150
credentialing, 6–8
Cameron, Julie, 41, 42–43 Cross, K. Patricia, 25, 90
Campbell, Barbara D., 16, 35, 37–38, 98 Csikszentmihalyi, Mihaly, 22–23, 46, 72–73,
Campbell, Joseph, 92, 119–20 95, 109–10
Canfield, Jack, 43, 120 cultural ambiguity, 96–101. See also world-
Carlson, Richard, 44, 52, 53, 145 view
Carnegie, Dale, 50, 89 cultural cringe, 68–70
Cawelti, John G., 4, 29 cultural critique: activist pedagogy, 32–33,
Celestine Prophesy: An Adventure (Redfield), 162n8; altruism, 30–34; cultural detach-
4, 41, 118, 145 ment and, 23–24, 66–67, 74; oral literary
Celestine Prophesy: An Experiential Guide criticism and, 15–16; primitive society as,
(Redfield and Adrienne), 41, 118–19 11–14; self-consciousness and, 7, 68, 74–75;
Celestine Vision: Living in the New Spiritual social activism, 30–34, 68
Awareness (Redfield), 145 cultural detachment, 23–24, 66–67, 74
channeling, 24, 43 cultural frame of reference, 9–10, 12, 84–88,
Chautauqua movement, 25, 47, 158 150–51
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Index 185
Cultural Literacy (Hirsch), 9, 87 Earthwatch, 33
cultural relativism, 69 education: activist pedagogy, 32–33, 162n8;
components of higher education, 88, 90;
Dalai Lama XIV, 31 experiential learning, 32; solitary vs.
Damrosch, David, 6–7 group learning, 88–89, 91–92. See also
Dance of Anger (Lerner), 45 self-education
Dance of Deception (Lerner), 45 Educators for Social Responsibility, 33
Dancing Wu Li Masters (Zukav), 45 Edwards, Jonathan, 21
Darling, David, 47, 107 einfache Formen (simple forms), 117
Davies, Paul, 39 Einstein, Albert, 107
Dawkins, Richard, 72 Elliott, William, 53
DeAngelis, Barbara, 65 El-Shamy, Hasan, 72
Dégh, Linda, 5, 15, 95–96 Embracing the Beloved: Relationship as a
de Mello, Anthony: on cultural detachment, Path to Awakening (Levine and Le-
67–68, 74; on self-interest, 22, 31–32; use vine), 38
of essay form, 30, 44 Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 24, 28–29, 50,
Dennett, Daniel C., 72 140, 142
Developing a 21st-Century Mind (Sinetar), 38 emic vs. etic categories, 16, 36
Dewey, John, 50 Emotional Intelligence (Goleman), 47, 54
DeWyze, Jeannette, 103 End the Struggle and Dance with Life (Jef-
dialogue subtype (essay form), 43–44 fers), 52–53, 143–44
diaries, vii–viii, 19 Engelsing, Rolf, 19
didactic exempla, 124–25 epigraphs, 143
didactic writing: didactic exempla, 124–25; epiphanies, 48, 125–26
history of, 27–28; as literature vs. popu- essay form, 42–44, 162n7
lar culture, 28–29; personal narrative ethnocentrism, 69
and, 123; self-help books as, 30. See also Evolving Self: A Psychology for the Third
style Millennium (Csikszentmihalyi), 73
diet self-help books, 40 Excuse Me, Your Life Is Waiting (Grabhorn), 4
Dominicé, Pierre, 86 expanded essay subtype (essay form), 44–45
Don’t Sweat the Small Stuff . . . and It’s All experiential learning, 32
Small Stuff (Carlson), 44, 52, 145
Dorson, Richard, 96, 151 fables, 27, 42, 120–21
Dostoyevsky, Fyodor, 142 fairy tales. See folktales
Do What You Love, the Money Will Follow fear, 15, 30, 101–4, 110–11
(Sinetar), 4, 143 Feel the Fear and Do It Anyway (Jeffers), 4,
Duke University Institute for Parapsycholo- 51, 67, 78, 102
gy, 113–14 Feel This Book (Stiller and Garofalo), 57
Dundes, Alan: on consciousness-raising, 98; Ferguson, Marilyn: Aquarian Conspiracy, xi;
on folk ideas, 72, 93–94, 96; on “lack and on embeddedness in nature, 31; on over-
lack liquidated” formula, 82; on oral liter- coming fear, 30; on spiritual evolution
ary criticism, 15–16 conspiracy, 15
Dyer, Wayne W.: career as writer, 51; cre- Fifth Discipline Fieldbook (Senge et al.), 47
dentialing of, 50; on cultural detach- Fifth Discipline: The Art and Practice of the
ment, 24, 67; as cultural performer, 4, Learning Organization (Senge), 22, 47, 80,
84–85; metacommentary and, 52, 143; on 106–7, 141
the stages of enlightenment, 31; use of 50 Self-Help Classics: 50 Inspirational Books
didactic exempla, 124–25, 127; use of to Transform Your Life (Bowdon), 56, 99
essay form, 45; use of memorates, 48–49, Finding Flow: The Psychology of Engagement
130–32; use of parable form, 42, 119; use with Everyday Life (Csikszentmihalyi),
of proverbs, 140, 144 109–10
12.Index.183-192/Dolby 185 2/7/05, 10:30 AM

186 Index
Fiore, Neil, 38 Get Out of Your Own Way (Goulston and
Fire in the Belly (Keen), 45 Goldberg), 38, 145
Fischer, Michael J., 11 Getting There from Here: Meditations for the
flow, 46, 109–10 Journey (Owen), 133, 154
Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience Getting Unstuck (Simon), 40
(Csikszentmihalyi), 46 Gifts from Eykis (Dyer), 42, 119
FOAF (friend-of-a-friend authentication), Glassie, Henry, 85
7–8, 16 God and the New Physics (Davies), 39
folk groups, 5–6 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 144
folk ideas, 72, 93–104. See also memes; Goffman, Erving, 86
worldview Goldberg, Philip, 38, 145
folklore: as error, 69–71; formulaic composi- Goleman, Daniel, 47, 54
tion and, 83–84; interviews as methodol- Goulston, Mark, 38, 145
ogy for, x, 153–55; origin of term, 71; per- Grabhorn, Lynn, 4
sonal philosophy and, 80; reciprocal Graff, Gerald, 78–79
ethnography, 149; scope of relevance of, Graff, Henry F., 26
151–52, 158; self-help books as, 2. See also Gray, John, 45, 56, 144
oral transmission; performance; tradition Greenberg, Gary, 16, 23, 57, 99
folktales, 4, 43, 95–96, 119 Grimm Brothers, 95, 119–20
For Each Other: Sharing Sexual Intimacy Gross, John, 45
(Barbach), 40 Gross, Ronald, 79
form: formal types of self-help books, 40–
47; “lack and lack liquidated” formula, 4– Habitat for Humanity, 33
5, 39–40, 82, 90; “medical model” type, Habits of the Heart: Individualism and Com-
70; memes (traditional units of world- mitment in American Life (Bellah, Mads-
view), 71–73, 94–96, 150; problem/solu- en, Sullivan, Swidler, and Tipton), 20–21,
tions formula, 39–40, 66, 69–70, 75, 83. 91, 97, 101
See also style Handbook for the Soul (Carlson and Shield,
Fosse, Bob, 113 eds.), 53
Fox, Matthew, 43 Handbook to Higher Consciousness (Keyes),
frames, 86–87 40, 135–36
Franklin, Benjamin, 28, 50 Hansen, Mark Victor, 43, 120
Freire, Paulo, 33 Happiness Is a Serious Problem: A Human
Freud, Sigmund, 50 Nature Repair Manual (Prager), 142
Fried, Stephen B., 16, 35–36 Hardin, Paula Payne, 38
Friendship with God: An Uncommon Dia- Heart Aroused: Poetry and the Preservation
logue (Walsch), 43 of the Soul in Corporate America (Whyte),
Fulghum, Robert, 64 128–29
functionalism, 10–11 Hibbard, Addison, 28
Further along the Road Less Traveled (Peck), Hirsch, E. D., Jr., 9, 87
139–40 Hoff, Benjamin, 43
Hoffman, Ivan, 24, 45, 102
Gandhi, Mahatma, 31 Hofstadter, Douglas, 72
Gans, Herbert J., 5–6, 59, 81 Holman, C. Hugh, 28
Gardner, Martin, 44 “Hook, The” (urban legend), 5
Garofalo, Janeane, 57 Hopcke, Robert H., 45, 114
gender, 5, 10–11, 58, 64–65 How to Be a Help Instead of a Nuisance:
genre: conventional scholarship as, 16–17; Practical Approaches to Giving Support,
didactic writing as, 27–28; einfache Formen Service, and Encouragement to Others
(simple forms) and, 117; emic vs. etic cate- (Wegela), 33–34
gories, 16, 36; self-help books as, 37–38 How to Enjoy Your Life in Spite of It All
Gergen, Kenneth J., 97 (Keyes), 40, 70–71
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Index 187
how-to form, 40 Keen, Sam, 41, 45, 92
How to Get Control of Your Time and Your Kennedy, Dan S., 147–48
Life (Lakein), 40, 108–9 Kett, Joseph F., 8, 25–26, 32, 89
How to Get What You Want and Want What Keyes, Ken, Jr., 40, 70–72, 135–37, 145
You Have (Gray), 144 Khan, Pir Vilayat Inayat, 107–8
How to Win Friends and Influence People “Killer in the Backseat” (urban legend):
(Carnegie), 89 authentication process for, 7; cultural
Hsu, Francis L. K., 29 references in, 5, 9–10, 12; cultural stabili-
Hufford, David, 149–50 zation by, 10–11, 15, 73; innovation in, 14;
humorous personal anecdotes, 132 self-education and, 16–17; text of, 3–4
Hunt, Margaret, 120 King, Martin Luther, Jr., 28
Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, Barbara, 115–16, 139
I’m Dysfunctional, You’re Dysfunctional (Ka- Kitchens, James A., 45, 102, 108, 126
miner), ix, 57 Kleiner, Art, 47
individualism: critical disposition and, 60– Knowles, Malcolm S., 25, 90
62; cultural ambiguity in, 101; self-cen- Kornfield, Jack, 44
teredness and, 105–6; self-education and, Kramer, Peter D., 54–55, 76–77, 81, 152
25; self-help-books model of, 20–22; self- Kraus, Karl, 144
interest and, 30–31; self-reliance and, 29– Kraybill, Donald B., 21
30, 58–59, 64–65, 81–82 Krestan, Jo-Ann, 45
insights, 145–46 Kuhn, Thomas, 54, 157
interviews, 153–55
Intimate Strangers (Rubin), 45 “lack and lack liquidated” formula, 4–5, 39–
Iron John (Bly), 43 40, 82, 90
It’s Only Too Late If You Don’t Start Now Lakein, Alan, 40, 108–9
(Sher), 105–6 Landscapes of the Soul (Porpora), ix–x
Langer, Ellen J., 47
Jacobs, Gregg D., 81, 159 language, 39, 135–36
James, William, 50 Lawless, Elaine, 149–50
Jampolsky, Gerald G., 62–63 Laws of the Spirit (Millman), 42, 119
Janda, Louis, 38 Lazere, Donald, 6–7
Jeffers, Susan: cultural detachment and, 67; Leadership and the New Science: Learning
as cultural performer, 4; as educator vs. about Organization from an Orderly Uni-
therapist, 78; metacommentary and, 51, verse (Wheatley), 48
52–53, 143–44; on the pervasiveness of Learning Alliance, 33
fear, 102 learning projects, 13–14, 25–26, 90–91, 154–55
Jeremias, Joachim, 116 Legacy of the Heart (Muller), 45
John-Roger, 142 legend conduits, 5
Johnson, Spencer, 22, 31, 42, 119, 150 Lempert, David H., 32
jokes, 117, 132 Lerner, Harriet Goldhor, 45, 104
Jolles, André, 117 Lesser, Elizabeth, 99, 107–8
Joyce, James, 48, 125 Levine, Ondrea, 38
Jung, Carl, 50, 144 Levine, Stephen, 38
Lévi-Strauss, Claude, 85, 97, 98–99
Kabat-Zinn, Jon, 30, 44, 106, 109, 143 Lewis, C. S., 50
Kafka, Franz, 144 liberation theology, 33
Kaminer, Wendy: on author credentialing, Lichtenberg, Georg Christoph, 144
8; on the dangers of misinformation, 60, Lieberman, David J., 40
153; on lack of originality, 67; on oversim- life stories, 77–78, 83–86, 92
plified style, 63–64; on reader passivity, ix, Listening to Prozac (Kramer), 54–55
23, 57–58, 78; on self-education, 25 Living Happily Ever After: Creating Trust,
Kant, Immanuel, 117 Luck, and Joy (Sinetar), 43, 119
12.Index.183-192/Dolby 187 2/7/05, 10:30 AM

188 Index
Living with the Passive-Aggressive Man Morris, Richard, 44
(Wetzler), 65 Motif-Index of Folk Literature (Thompson),
Long, Edward LeRoy, Jr., 88, 90 132–33
Looking Out for #1 (Ringer), 30–31, 31 Muller, Wayne, 45
Lopate, Phillip, 162n7 myths, 92, 93–94, 97–98, 100–101
Love Is a Story: A New Theory of Relation-
ships (Sternberg), 116–17 narrative: anecdotes as evidence, 62, 132–33;
Love Is Letting Go of Fear (Jampolsky), 63 author vs. client stories, 123; jokes, 117, 132;
Lynch, Aaron, 72, 95 organization of experience and, 113–21;
psychological case studies as, 112–13;
Madsen, Richard, 20–21. See also entries shaggy dog stories, 114–15; story collec-
under Bellah, Robert tion subtype, 42–43. See also folktales;
Make It So: Leadership Lessons from Star myths; parables; personal narratives;
Trek, The Next Generation (Roberts and urban legends
Ross), 43 Natural Grace (Fox and Sheldrake), 43
Malinowski, Bronislaw, 94 Never Be Lied to Again (Lieberman), 40
Mallinger, Allan E., 103 New Age culture, 29, 98–100, 103–9, 143
Maltz, Maxwell, 50, 147–48 New Age Journal, 99
Manifest Your Destiny (Dyer), 31, 130 New American Spirituality: A Seeker’s Guide
Marcus, George E., 11 (Lesser), 99, 107–8
Maslow, Abraham, 30, 50 New Psycho-Cybernetics: The Original Sci-
Mather, Cotton, 28 ence of Self-Improvement and Success That
McGraw, Phillip, 4 Has Changed the Lives of 30 Million People
McGregor, Douglas, 50 (Maltz), 147–48
McKeachie, Wilbert J., 32 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 142, 144
McWilliams, Peter, 142 Noer, David M., 39
Mechling, Jay, 152–53, 158 Novalis (Friedrich von Hardenberg), 144
mediating structures, 97–101, 152–53, 158 Now Habit (Fiore), 38
medical self-help books, 40
meditation subtype (essay form), 44 One Minute for Myself (Johnson), 31, 42
memes, 72–73, 94–96, 150. See also folk ideas One Minute Manager (Johnson and Blan-
memorates, 130–32 chard), 22, 119
Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus Oracle at the Supermarket: The American
(Gray), 45, 56 Preoccupation with Self-Help Books
Mentor’s Spirit: Life Lessons on Leadership (Starker), 36, 57
and the Art of Encouragement (Sinetar), oral literary criticism, 15–16
77, 78 oral transmission: automigration, 73, 95;
Merton, Thomas, 50 FOAF (friend-of-a-friend authentica-
metacognitive skills, 74 tion), 7–8, 16; legend conduits, 5; self-
metacommentary, 8, 51–55, 77, 154 education and, 16–17. See also folklore;
metafolklore, 16 tradition
Mezirow, Jack, 86, 89 Ordinary People as Monks and Mystics (Sin-
Mieder, Wolfgang, 138, 144 etar), 48
Miller, Ronald S., 99 originality, 64, 67
Millman, Dan, 42, 119 Our Dreaming Mind (Van de Castle), 47
Mindfulness (Langer), 47 Owen, David, Rev., 133, 154–55, 159
Minding the Body, Mending the Mind (Bory-
senko), 40 paperback books, 19, 50
Minnett, Ann M., 16, 35, 37–38, 98 parable form, 41–42, 115–16, 118–19
Minor, Herman, IV, 57 parables: biblical parables, 21–22, 42, 115–16;
Moldenhauer, Joseph J., 141 parable form, 41–42, 115–16, 118–19; per-
Montaigne, Michel de, 45 sonal parables, 128–30, 132, 133–34
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Index 189
Parady, Marianne, 30, 43, 142 Prager, Dennis, 142
parapsychology, 113–14 Principle-Centered Leadership (Covey), 38
Park, Edwards A., 29 problem/solution form, 39–40, 66, 69–70
Passages: Predictable Crises of Adult Life Propp, Vladimir, 4
(Sheehy), 47 proverbs, 138–42
Path with Heart: A Guide through the Perils Psycho-Cybernetics (Maltz), 50, 147–48
and Promises of Spiritual Life (Korn- Psychologist’s Book of Self-Tests (Janda), 38
field), 44 psychology self-help books: how-to form of,
Peak Learning: How to Create Your Own 40; “psychological self” model, 23; “psy-
Lifelong Education Program for Personal chospiritual healing” model of, 70; testi-
Enlightenment and Professional Success monial evidence in, 112–14, 148–49; as
(Gross), 79 therapy, 35–36
Peale, Norman Vincent, 50 publishing, viii, 2, 19, 37–38
Peck, M. Scott: as cultural performer, 4; on Puritans, 21
the obligation for self-improvement, 21–
22; problem/solutions formula in, 70; on quotation, 142–44
social activism, 32; use of essay form, 45;
use of personal insight tales, 126–28; use Radway, Janice A., 4
of proverbs, 139–40 Ram Dass, 31, 104–5, 107–10
performance: advice vs. transmission of reader-response theory, 13, 122
values and, 76, 152; interpretive control in, readers: appreciation for good writing, 61;
122; nonverbalized text and, 84–86; oral author credentials and, 8; as bricoleurs,
vs. literary performance, 14, 84–85; per- 85–86; corporate (business) readers, 22;
former-audience distance, 77–78. See also gender and, 58, 64–65; international self-
folklore help readers, 56; interpretive control and,
Perry, Lewis, 29 122–23; life story as text, 77–78, 83–86, 92;
personal growth self-help books, 40 passivity of, ix, xi, 6, 58–61, 157; personal
personal insight tales, 48–49, 125–26, 129, mythology and, 92; personal philosophy
161n6 of, x, 79–80, 86, 91, 153–55; as purposeful
personal mythology, 92 readers, 90–91; reception as authority
personal narratives: didactic exempla, 124– over context, 13
25; humorous personal anecdotes, 132; Real Magic (Dyer), 45, 130
life stories, 77–78, 83–86, 92; literary reciprocal ethnography, 149
intentionality and, 121–22; memorates, Redfield, James: as cultural performer, 4; on
130–32; personal insight tales, 48–49, spiritual unity, 106; use of insights, 145;
125–26, 129, 161n6; personal parables, use of parable form, 41, 118; on the
128–30, 132, 133–34 “wounded self” model, 23
personal parables, 128–30, 132, 133–34 Rediscovering the Joy and Meaning in Your
personal philosophy, x, 79–80, 86, 91, 153–55 Life (Kitchens), 102
personal relationship self-help books, 40 religion: “channeled” books and, 24, 43;
philosophy, x liberation theology, 33; obligation for self-
Plato, 28, 43–44, 143 improvement and, 21–22; scriptural poet-
poetic language: biblical use of, 137, 140–41; ic language, 137, 140–41. See also Bible
insights, 145–46; memorizable sayings, Rilke, Phia, 144
135–36; proverbs, 138–42; quotation, Ringer, Robert J., 30–31
142–44 Road Less Traveled (Peck), 4, 45, 126–28
Poor Richard’s Legacy: American Business Robbins, Anthony, 48, 143–44
Values from Benjamin Franklin to Michael Roberts, Charlotte, 47
Milken (Baida), 50 Roberts, Jane, 24, 43
Pope, Alexander, 28, 103, 143 Roberts, Wess, 43
popular nonfiction, viii–ix, 26–27, 38, 46 Rogers, Carl, 42
Porpora, Douglas V., ix–x Rogers, Tim B., 136–37
12.Index.183-192/Dolby 189 2/7/05, 10:30 AM

190 Index
Ross, Bill, 43 Seven Secrets for Successful Living: Tapping
Ross, Richard B., 47 the Wisdom of Ralph Waldo Emerson to
Rubin, Lillian B., 45 Achieve Love, Happiness, and Self-Reliance
Rules and Tools for Leaders (Smith), 40 (Parady), 30, 43, 142
Rushforth, Sam, 32–33 sexuality self-help books, 40
Russell, Bertrand, 50 shaggy dog stories, 114–15
Shakespeare, William, 143
Santrock, John W., 16, 35, 37–38, 98 Sharing Wisdom: The Practical Art of Giving
scholarly writing, 16–17 and Receiving Mentoring (Wicks), 76
Schrempp, Gregory, 60 Sheehy, Gail, 47
Schwartz, Tony, 53 Sheldrake, Rupert, 43
Scrase, David, 144 Sher, Barbara, 105–6
Seat of the Soul (Zukav), 45 Shield, Benjamin, 53
Secret of Shambhala: In Search of the Elev- Shortcuts to God: Finding Peace Quickly
enth Insight (Redfield), 41, 118 through Practical Spirituality (Jampol-
Secrets about Men Every Woman Should sky), 62–63
Know (DeAngelis), 65 Short Treatise on the Great Virtues (Comte-
self: autotelic personality, 109–10; “detached Sponville), x–xi
self” model, 23–24, 66–67, 74; “obligated Should You Leave? A Psychiatrist Explores
self” model, 21–22; “psychological self” Intimacy and Autonomy—and the Nature
model, 23; “rugged individualist” model, of Advice (Kramer), 54–55, 76, 152
20, 29, 64–65; self-consciousness and, 66– Simon, Sidney B., 40
67, 105–6; simple self, 66–68; “social self” Simonds, Wendy, 56–57
model, 22–23, 161n3; as soul vs. psycho- Sinetar, Marsha: classification of works by,
logical self-referential entity, 103 4, 38; on impersonal mentoring, 77, 78;
self-confidence, 81–83 proselytizing style of, 48; quoted by other
self-consciousness, 66–68, 74–75 writers, 143; use of textual interpretation,
self-education: adult education, 8, 25–26, 43, 119–20
88–89; distance learning and, 77–78; im- Six Pillars of Self-Esteem (Branden), 144
personal mentoring and, 78, 159; impor- Sky’s the Limit (Dyer), 45, 67
tance in American culture, viii, 8–9, 25– Smith, Bryan J., 47
26; individualism and, 25; integration of Smith, Perry M., 40
knowledge and, 79; learning projects, 13– social activism, 30–34, 68. See also cultural
14, 25–26, 90–91, 154–55; life stories and, critique
77–78, 86. See also also education Socrates, 43–44
self-help books: core themes in, 99–102; Solomon, Robert C., 77, 81
defined, 35–38; history of, viii, 2, 19, 37–38; Soul Search: A Scientist Explores the Afterlife
reference works on, ix–xi, 16, 89–90, 98 (Darling), 47, 107
Self-Help Nation (Tiede), ix, 57, 64 Sources of the Self: The Making of Modern
“self-improvement” term, 37 Identity (Taylor), 161n3
Self Matters: Creating Your Life from the spiritual unity, 104–7, 110–11. See also world-
Inside Out (McGraw), 4 view
Self on the Shelf: Recovery Books and the Spontaneous Healing (Weil), 40
Good Life (Greenberg), 16, 99 Stanovich, Keith E., 112, 114, 148–49
self-quotation, 143–44 Stark, Marg, 44
Senge, Peter M., 22, 47, 80, 106–7, 141 Starker, Steven, 36, 57, 60
sermons, 28, 133 Staying on the Path (Dyer), 144
Seven Habits of Highly Effective People (Cov- Steinem, Gloria, 67
ey), 4, 38, 67, 120 Sternberg, Robert, 116–17
Seven Habits of Highly Ineffective People Stewart, Edward C., 96–97
(Minor), 57 Stiller, Ben, 57
12.Index.183-192/Dolby 190 2/7/05, 10:30 AM

Index 191
“Stolen Kidney” (urban legend), 3 50; automigration and, 74, 95; cultural
stories. See narrative frame of reference and, 87–88; originality
story collection subtype (essay form), 42–43 and, 14–15, 63–64, 148, 150; origin of term,
style: academic accountability and, 60, 112– 71–72. See also folklore; oral transmission
13; characterization, 118; fictionalized trust, 30, 101–4, 110–11
context, 76; importance of narrative, 113– Tying Rocks to Clouds: Meetings and Conver-
21; originality, 64, 67; oversimplification, sations with Wise and Spiritual People
62–63; as popular/applied vs. academic (Elliott), 53
research, 38; role of provocative ques- Tylor, Edward Burnett, 60, 69–70, 70
tions, 81; style of writing, 6–7, 39, 61–62;
testimonial quotation, 112–14, 148–49. See unity, 104–7, 110–11. See also worldview
also didactic writing; form urban legends, 3–4, 5, 7–8, 72–73
Sullivan, William M., 20–21. See also entries
under Bellah, Robert Valley-Fox, Anne, 41, 92
Swidler, Ann, 20–21. See also entries under Values Clarification (Kirschenbaum, Howe,
Bellah, Robert and Simon), 40
synchronicity, 113–14, 130 Van de Castle, Robert L., 47
syncretism, 100 Vázsonyi, Andrew, 95–96
Vogel, Linda J., 33, 91
Talking to Ducks (Kitchens), 45, 126 volunteerism, 32
Tannen, Deborah, 6, 50 von Sydow, Carl Wilhelm, 73–74, 130
Tao of Love (Hoffman), 45
Tao of Pooh (Hoff), 43 Walsch, Neale Donald, 24, 43, 56, 105
taste culture, 5–6, 59–60 Way of the Peaceful Warrior (Millman), 42
Taylor, Charles, 161n3 Way to Love (de Mello), 44, 67–68
Tenth Insight: Holding the Vision (Redfield), Wegela, Karen Kissel, 33–34
41, 106, 118, 145 Weil, Andrew, 40
testimonial quotation, 112–14, 148–49 Wending Our Way (Owen), 154
text, 83–86, 92 Wetzler, Scott, 65
textual interpretation subtype (essay What Are You Doing with the Rest of Your
form), 43 Life? Choices in Midlife (Hardin), 38
There Are No Accidents: Synchronicity and What Love Asks of Us (Branden and
the Stories of Our Lives (Hopcke), 45, 114 Branden), 132
Thompson, Stith, 72, 132–33 What Really Matters: Searching for Wisdom
Thoreau, Henry David, 28, 50, 141 in America (Schwartz), 53
Thrall, William Flint, 28 Wheatley, Margaret J., 48
Tiede, Tom, ix, 57, 64, 77, 153 Wherever You Go, There You Are (Kabat-
Tillich, Paul, 158 Zinn), 30, 44, 106, 109, 143
time, 107–11 Whiteley, Richard C., 42
Timeless Healing: The Power and Biology of Who Moved My Cheese? (Johnson), 150
Belief (Benson and Stark), 44 Whyte, David, 128–29
Tipton, Steven M., 20–21. See also entries Wicks, Robert J., 76
under Bellah, Robert Williams, Arthur L., Jr., 40
Tocqueville, Alexis de, 20 Women and Self-Help Culture: Reading Be-
Toelken, Barre, 14 tween the Lines (Simonds), 56–57
Tönnies, Ferdinand, 20–21, 32 Wordsworth, William, 24
Too Good for Her Own Good (Krestan), 45 workbook form, 40–41
Too Perfect: When Being in Control Gets Out workbook subtype (essay form), 42–43
of Control (Mallinger and DeWyze), 103 Working with Emotional Intelligence (Gole-
Tough, Allen, 13, 25, 90 man), 47
tradition: acceptance as observation, 149– worldview: cultural ambiguity and, 96–101;
12.Index.183-192/Dolby 191 2/7/05, 10:30 AM

192 Index
cultural stability and, 10–11, 15; folk Thought (John-Roger and McWilliams),
ideas, 72, 93–104; infused in self-help 142
books, 1–2; memes, 71–73, 94–96, 150; You Just Don’t Understand: Women and Men
multiculturalism and, 1, 105–6; as shared in Conversation (Tannen), 6
cultural frame, 87; spiritual unity and, You’ll See It When You Believe It (Dyer), 48–
104–7, 110–11 49, 124–25, 130–32, 140
World Waiting to Be Born (Peck), 70 Your Erroneous Zones (Dyer), 4, 45, 49
writers. See authors Your Mythic Journey (Keen and Valley-Fox),
Wuthnow, Robert, x, 100 41, 92
Your Sacred Self (Dyer), 130
Yankah, Kwesi, 139
You Can’t Afford the Luxury of a Negative Zukav, Gary, 45
12.Index.183-192/Dolby 192 2/7/05, 10:30 AM

sandra k. dolby is a professor of folklore and American
studies at Indiana University, Bloomington. She recently spent a
year in Norway as a Roving American Studies Scholar for the
Fulbright Program and earlier spent six months in Australia as a
fellow at the National Library in Canberra. She is the author of
Literary Folkloristics and the Personal Narrative and previously
taught in the English department at the University of Houston.
13.Au.colo.193-194/Dolby 193 2/7/05, 10:31 AM

The University of Illinois Press
is a founding member of the
Association of American University Presses.
Composed in 10.5/13 Minion

by Celia Shapland
for the University of Illinois Press
Manufactured by Thomson-Shore, Inc.
University of Illinois Press

1325 South Oak Street
Champaign, IL 61820-6903
www.press.uillinois.edu
13.Au.colo.193-194/Dolby 194 2/7/05, 10:31 AM

Why Americans Keep Reading Them

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Self-Help Books

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University of Illinois Press

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∞ This book is printed on acid-free paper.

The Library of Congress cataloged the cloth edition as follows:

Dolby, Sandra K., 1946–

paperback isbn 978-0-252-07518-6

00.FM.i-xiv_DOLBY.pmd 4 11/8/07, 3:14 PM

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00.Ftmtter.i-xiv/Dolby 7 2/7/05, 10:14 AM

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ination of this phenomenon—the rise of this body of popular nonﬁction

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be continually renewed and available. And self-help writers have willingly

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Do most Americans share a single, collective worldview? In other words, in

000.Intro.1-18/Dolby 1 2/7/05, 10:15 AM

formation and articulation of personal philosophies—the building blocks of

The Appeal of a Proven Formula

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of various bookstore chains, I kept thinking of another popular American

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The system of authentication employed by those writing popular nonﬁc-

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an element of consumerism, but, as with instruction or advice offered in a

What Oft Was Thought

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nonﬁction itself. I am convinced that the wealth of traditional materials—the

Maintaining the Stability of Culture

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Writing as Performance in Context

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The writers and readers of popular nonﬁction are immersed as well in a

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Innovation, Transformation, Enlightenment

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I am calling here “creative cultural plagiarism,” the often unacknowledged

Discovering Shared Assumptions

Experiential Reading: The Book as Text

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My model for disciplined self-reﬂection—my grandmother, writing her daily

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The Self and Community in American Society and History

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Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft (1887) posits the collective and cooperative

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expects, investing himself or herself in the worthy actions of progress and

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combines a sense of detachment with an understanding of “the god with-

The Tradition of Adult Self-Education

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